








































• 
































■ 





















































































































* 

: ' \ > ^ 

























b ■' 












CJ 


MANITYS 


H 


ading Curse, 


THE SCRIBES AND 



BY ONE OF THEM. 


•SVs-v. 






Ssi 




Copyright 1891, 

By E. H. ANDRAE, Bookseller , 
Dallas, Texas. 



































- ... I 


DALLAS, TEXAS: 

JOHN F. WORLEY, STATIONER AND PRINTER, 
1891. 










\ 









WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? 


The world is unsatisfied. Humanity is not hap¬ 
py. Life is a drag. Autumn leaves and ashes ap¬ 
pear where bloom and hope might shine. Of course 
it is easy to say, man is hungry as the sea, dissatis¬ 
fied as a born growler, and as unfit to live as a 
headless chicken. It is easy to say, too, that he is 
like a monster Frankenstein, ready to slay those 
who permit him to breathe the air of freedom. 

But are humanity’s grievances without their rem¬ 
edies, the aching pains without relief, the gnawing 
cancers past any cure, the crying evils eternal ? 

Who is responsible for the conventional lies of 
our civilization? 

Who lies, defends falsehood and perpetuates 
sham ? 

Who is responsible for the steady rise of the 
squalor line and increase of the proletariat ? 

Who increases the hatred between nationalities 
and fires the imagination to individual combat ? 

Who destroys body and soul of the civilized man 
and woman ? 

Who lays waste the morning and noon of man’s 
and woman’s life ? 

Who sneers at science ? 



4 


Who is Responsible? 


Who favors barbarous customs ? 

Who erects the high perches for mediocre indi¬ 
viduals and the women and defends them? 

Who casts stones ? 

Who blackmails? 

Who makes the levying of blackmail possible ? 
Who causes unhappiness ? 

Who preaches renunciation without reason, with¬ 
out cause ? 

Who favors deaduess w 7 hen there can be life ? 
Who is the enemy of flesh and blood ? 

Who administers the last kick to the suicide ? 
Whose morality is for the greatest possible harm ? 
Who originates and fosters secret vice ? 

Who swells his chest as a great moral institution ? 
Who exacts most and gives least ? 

Who objects to sunshine ? 

Who is responsible for the multitude of unem¬ 
ployed ? 

Who emancipates women indiscriminately ? 

Who assails emancipated women most bitterly ? 
Who shirks all responsibility ? 

Who is the industrial slave breeder ? 

Who plies the lash most unmerifully ? 

Who dupes ? 

Who obstructs the path of genuine progress ? 
Who denounces virtue (excellence) ? 

Who rides over judge and jury, right and privi¬ 
leges with impunity ? 

Who increases lunacy so alarmingly ? 

Who multiplies law instead of forbearance ? 

Who is the cause of all the atrocity of history ? 


Who is Responsible f 5 

Who seeks to convert free America into a priest- 
ridden hierarchy ? 

Who furnishes the periodical crop of saviours ? 

The almighty dollar ? 

Ignorance ? 

Passion ? 

Not all ! Either one of these, only when abused, 
are instrumental to mischief. But either one of 
these have got their boss. The answer must be ; 
The leaders, the teachers, the bell-wethers of the 
human herd, or those who are instrumental of abuse 
and non-use. For woman is ever what man makes 
her, man is ever what his tutor makes him. The 
human plasma is no more—if it ever was—a free, in¬ 
dependent, unfaltering agency. It is pliable and 
mouldable to a high degree, if not altogether so. 
The tew exceptions prove this rule. The attitude 
of the average individual is open-mouthed, open- 
eared, opinion-hungry. Not self-willed, self-opin¬ 
ionated and skeptic. The most absurd doctrines 
under the sun he receives ravenously and without 
questioning. Independent thought has plainly be¬ 
come a lost art with the common herd. Tell them, 
for instance, in a plausable manner, that pure air is 
bad to breathe and lo ! 99 per cent, at once will hold 
their nose or endeavor not to breathe. Tell them it 
numbs the body to sleep too much and forthwith 
plenty will rob themselves of the necessary sleep. 
Tell anybody, as often happens, that under the 
tropics nature produces tenfold the amount of food 
and raiment than in the temperate climate, and lo ! 
with difficulty is even a starving wretch convinced 


6 


Who is Responsible f 


that in terra caliente , every rich and juicy blade of 
grass must naturally turn into an unnutritious 
reed, and that a hot blazing sun ever will destroy 
as much as it produces. Even sentiment, no doubt 
the foundation of most opinions, is nevertheless 
likewise overthrown by unremitting perseverance 
and influencing. 

Good or bad opinions are ever the springs of ac¬ 
tions ; whosoever is responsible for opinions is like¬ 
wise responsible for the result thereof. Environment 
may generate views. But whence comes environ¬ 
ment, especially the artificial kind ? Man is the 
only manager for man's affairs on earth . This man¬ 
agement is not only poor, but bad. What is the 
cause of it ? Poor or bad opinions, or the manu¬ 
facture of wrong opinions, i. e., intellectual dishon¬ 
esty, or in plain English, lying , 

Exact science, or the knowledge of truth, as per¬ 
fected by the best brains of the white race in the 
nineteenth century, stands pure and unsullied. It 
plainly up to the hour of going to press, has fur 
nished the only reliable opinions and the only 
standard whereby to measure anything. If science 
has any faults, plainly it is not deception or villain¬ 
ous fraud and its share in the origin of the evils of 
to-day can only be sought in its criminal modesty or 
criminal absence. The crime of scientific modesty 
is not by any means a small one, when we consider 
that science was, or soon will be, the first bell wether 
of the human herd, and as such ought to be the 
loudest one. Yet scientific modesty is defensible, 
or at least to-day hardly indictable. Science’s crime 


The Commo7i Scribe. 


7 


must rather be absence. Why is science absent 
when it ought to be present ? Or is it present and 
cannot be heard on account of blowing of ram’s 
horns with great loudness ? If it should really be 
entirely absent is it because truth and honesty are 
crowded to the wall by whom ? By some liar, # or 
fakir, or raving idiot, or intellectual juggler, or 
mawkish sentimentalist ? Who can be responsible 
for the absence of science (or truth) but fraudulent 
subsiitutes, such as Scribe literature, theology, soph¬ 
ism, fallacy, imagery, ignorance and false philosophy. 
Here only can be the culprits ; here only can we 
look for the cause of the failure of the truth. 


THE COMMON SCRIBE. 

What levity ! To insult the sublime brotherhood 
of literary lights with that irreverent term of Scribe ! 
But of course you hope that I mean only the 
nuisance of the editorial sanctum—the literary hack. 
By no means. I mean by that term those brilliant, 
versatile, elegant lights that above humanity, above 
truth, above science, use their power of words for 
evil, who use their talent for catering to and per¬ 
petuating those older fanatic functions of the 
human mind which were man’s stock in trade in 
undeveloped periods years ago. These are, in 1891 
in America, “common ” and professional. The lit¬ 
erary hack is immaterial, the scientific scribbler, 
when not assailing truth, excusable. Those literary 



8 


The Common Scribe. 


professionals or amateurs who serve the useful or 
ornamental, humorous or sentimental, without incul¬ 
cating cussedness are entitled to the high honors 
and lasting laurels usually bestowed. These are 
not common. These are “ literary.” These are not 
scribes. The common scribe knows not the truth, 
is one-sided, prejudiced, dangerous, criminal and 
malicious. Any man with average good sense can 
single out of the tons of literature that are unloaded 
daily, that part—not by any means small—which 
measured by the standard of the true, the beautiful 
and the good, must be condemned as the work of 
the common scribe. 

Shakespeare said : 

“ het me have men about me that are fat. Sleek-headed 
men and such as sleep o’ nights; yond’ Cassius has a lean 
and hungry look ; he thinks too much : such men are dan¬ 
gerous.” 

Had he lived in the nineteenth century and seen 
the terrible increase of the scribe no doubt he would 
have said : Let me have men about me that can eat 
a meal. Yond’ fiends persist in saying man eats 
too much and sleeps too long. My stomach growls 
as I behold their nervous, hollow glare. Let me 
have men whose noses turn not disgustingly from 
mother earth. ’Tis sad to hear such men cuss ’loud 
and openly the heroes of Olympian games and 
fasten angel’s wings unto the tottering cripples of 
to-day. Advanced and civilized? I saw a pencil hero 
hurl epithets as vile as offal at the trembling form of 
a dementi 1 angel and call aloud for violence of 
the rabble, I see men daily making bitter war on 
nature’s glory and, as if afflicted with a deadly virus, 


The Common Scribe. 


9 

run amuck at the sight of flesh and blood. Whrre^ 
Epicurus’ sound philosophy illumined only one 
brief, happy day, these modern fiends plied torches 
of destruction to the altars of the tiny human plasma, 
and screeching night-owls of religion disturb the 
song of joyous lads and happy lasses. Yon men are 
certainly not human, much less humane. They are 
reptiles, venomous, cold-blooded, vile, ceremonious, 
bent on evil. 

Of you men let us consider all those who have 
succeeded in transfixing that simple matter, 
thought, not in monuments of solid facts, but on 
paper for study, pleasure or out of malice or revenge. 
Whatever truth or science may emanate from a i 
ephemeral or time honored library production, 
the first conspicuous thing about most is an animos¬ 
ity or contempt lor all human clay, which is 
lessened or increased according to the amount of 
spirituality associated with the object of their 
hatred, for hatred and dislike it plainly is. Spirit¬ 
uality though with the average writer means not 
sense or intelligence, but soul, elevation, appear¬ 
ance, effect, immateriality, enchantment and im¬ 
aginary wings. And it is quite certain if a square 
meal, a prize fight, a pretty ankle, a well shaped 
neck, a foot race, a dance, a keg of wine could only 
show the average literary individual to be coupled 
with some elevating humbug, his cries of corruption, 
beastliness, brutality, filthiness, baseness, perversity, 
etc , would at once cease. Whether self-glorifica¬ 
tion induces the common scribe to “ fy animal ’ ’ at 
his earthly make-up or not, certain it is that the 


to The Common Scribe. 

whole animal kingdom does not afford a single 
parallel and it is impossible to find a horse that 
would eat his oats and'then turn round and curse it 
as vile offal and corruption that ought to be 
reduced or gradually wiped off the face of the earth. 
Nor is there a dog that would condemn a bone as an 
injurious thing, or sigh for a wing wheiewith to fly 
away from a plate of sausages. Or is Moses, who 
longed for the flesh-pots of Egypt and denouced 
scores of animals as unclean and not fit to eat, 
merely an exception ? Paul, whom a little 
carnal attention saved from death by shipwreck and 
who wishes (Romans VII, 6.) to be carnally minded 
is death, to be spiritually minded is life and peace, 
only inconsistent and allegorical ? If they were, 
they nevertheless showed this peculiar trait of the 
scribe, who nowadays, as of old, concluded that 
happiness is only obtainable by total renunciation 
of it or a kind of a partial suicide. Or will you tell 
me that Scribe Tolstoi, who recognizes Nirwana or 
non-existence as the only happiness attainable, is iu 
love with the human make-up? Or that the White 
Cross editor crusading against the ‘ ‘ physical ’ ’ is 
merely a hypocrite and does not mean it? There is not 
a newspaper printed that does not contain a fling at 
some physical trait of the human anatomy. There 
are very few books in existence that do not advocate 
some curtailment of life or the fountains of life. The 
very best modern standard works are literary pro¬ 
ductions that aim a blow at the true, the real, the 
physical, the solid and seek to undermine the 
earthly. Moral humbug is actually changmg human 


The Common Scribe . ir 

nature and not by any means for the better. 
Is not anti-flesh and blood crusading against 
the results of weak nerves and weak wills, or 
what is the cause of this modern brood that finds 
fault with the great advance of humanity at the 
time of the forming of the constitution of the 
United States and clamors aloud for crucifixion ? 
It is the scribe who is the cause of the degeneration 
of the white race from the rational, high plane they 
once occupied when Epicurus framed his only sound 
philosophy of the sepretne good being found in 
that which is agreeable. It was the scribe that 
decried Epicurean philosophy; it is he that even 
now endeavors to belittle the high standard of the 
Grecian art, architecture, sculpture or painting 
that is scarcely equalled by the genii of the present 
day and which is so sincerely detested by their 
disciples in their modern crusades against museums 
and natural or rational literature. Crusading of any 
kind might be excusable if ’t did not lead to worse 
evils and was originated by lower passions. To 
generate leprosy with moral ideas and dig graves 
with spirituality might be permitted, but it does not 
stop there, nearly every week in the wild, untu¬ 
tored American “west” strong men in crowds drag 
forth defenseless women and beat them with switch¬ 
es half to death because they have not got a taste for 
a graveyard life. The former are said to be actuated 
by good motives for civilization or advancement. Is 
there not the rural scribe’s malice, visible in those 
acts of barbarity, for in place of deprecating grudge 
and jealousy, he pours out idiotic lamentations over 


/2 The Common Scribe. 

the decay of manners and morality. It is the scribe 
that names a harmless, nay, beneficial action an 
outrage. It is the scribe that fans the low passions 
of untutored, joyless men by his call for “the peo¬ 
ple's revenge,” “to deal terrible justice,” “to ap¬ 
pease the wrath of the source all law.” It is usually 
the rural scribe that is responsible for the whipping- 
bee, the hanging match, the ambush shooting pic¬ 
nic, that a barbarous rural populace is only too 
ready to perpetrate, because there is no other recre¬ 
ation, and which the Greeks and Romans ioo B. 
C,, would certainly be ashamed of. It is the scribe 
who inculcates the ideas of barbaric honor that in¬ 
duces a father to run his daughter with imprecations 
from house and home, and the ignorant yap’s cry of 
“soiled bird” whispered into the ear of his col¬ 
league, is no less the evidence of the scribe and 
Pharisee’s foul philosophy. The soiled bird can 
ever Be only the yahoo covered with a crust of igno¬ 
rance, the individual to be dishonored and despised 
must ever be the one who cringes before the opin¬ 
ions of his inferiors. To say “so and so is the 
truth,” is no excuse, because the truth invented by 
the scribe and pharisee is invariably by the light of 
science pure and unadulterated falsehood, which is 
not whitewashed or converted into truth by isolation, 
blindfolding, manipulating the light, etc. It is the 
scribe’s terminology which is characteristic of every¬ 
thing that is shady and it would be well for some¬ 
body to shed a few rays particularly on this sadly 
neglected subject for the benefit of mankind, es¬ 
pecially on the word honor and purity conscience 


The Common Scribe . 


13 


and conscientiousness, a free moral agency and the 
foundations of duty. Every individual may have a 
right to roost as high as he pleases, and loftily 
point out which way to go, but if the perch or 
the percher leads to mischief or disorder, or converts 
the perching instinct into a vice then it is time to 
lower the superstructure to the bedrock of the latest 
unshaken'truths. “Unshaken truth, ha-ha!— 
Here has Herbert Spencer already commenced to re¬ 
nounce his works. Ya-ha-ha!” gleefully rejoins the 
common scribe, and if the good that truth and 
science ever have discovered were to-day scattered 
back again into horrible chaos the scribe would 
jump for joy and clap his hands at the defeat of 
scientific labor with the usual “I told you so. ’ ’ Verily 
of all the vandals that lie in wait to throttle the 
tiny plant, that is a joy forever the average 
literary individual is only second to the 
reverend expounders of demonology. The bed¬ 
rock foundations pointed out by a Spen¬ 
cer, a Huxley, a Mills, a Darwin, a Tyndall, a 
Helmbolz, to keep a future generation out of the 
quagmire of false teaching, and spare millions tor¬ 
ture and needless pain, are nothing more to them 
than the red flag is to the infuriated bull What 
science or a scientist is, a scribe has no more idea 
of than a peacock has of tin-type photography, 
John L. Sullivan’s science, Christian science, spirit- 
rapping, mechanical ingenuity and plausible relig¬ 
ious humbug, a weather prophet’s tricks are just the 
same to him, if not better, than the data of Ethics, 
Origin of Species, or Conservation of Energy. That 


H 


The Common Scribe. 


the former are only weaker substitutes and poor imi¬ 
tations of the latter kind is not apparent to the 
scribe. 1891 truths are surrounded to him with a 
haze and 1691 humbug with a halo. The fondest 
hope of the common scribe is that 1891 truths may 
yet perish miserably and ignominiously, and that 
idiotic myths of ancient charlatans may come in vogue 
again with ordinances, law, fire and the sword. 
Exact science is to him like the sunlight is to a mole. 
There is not a library in existence that does not con¬ 
tain nine-tenths of scribe and Pharisee would-be- 
science to the exclusion of the true article. And 
what is the consequence ? A cow, a dog, the bjrds 
in the air, the beasts in the woods, the fish in the 
water manage their affairs better, enjoy their life 
more satisfactory than the lords of creation—man. 
The African negro has more gumption than the 
book and paper reading white man, at least in find¬ 
ing ways and means to a sane life. And the latter 
may not always kill the goose that lays the golden 
egg, but his teachers will try very hard to do it for 
him. The pupil’s remonstrance is in vain. Take 
for instance that part of our life which is called merely 
sensual. 

No matter how busy throwing columns of cold 
water on truth, science or other better scribes, no 
matter how villainously silent on useful topics, no 
matter how hard he sits on the dissenter, no matter 
how great the discord among the fraternity, one 
thing is certain and indisputed among all the scribes 
in the land, and that is that sensuality is no good what¬ 
ever. Poke a stick into a hornet’s nest and you can- 


The Common Scribe. 


not cause a greater fury than when you mention 
sensuality as a good thing to the scribes. 

No matter if .sensuality or 99 per cent, of it made 
man what he is, no matter if it is the only founda¬ 
tion of the little gumption man possesses or ever 
will possess, with them it is invariably man’s basest, 
foulest, filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest attribute under the 
sun. Of course this is only consistent with their 
general hatred of the flesh. 

It is no wonder really, after all, that proud and 
intelligent man’s life is only a series of foolish trials 
and mistakes, his existence inferior to that of a dog, 
with no useful lessons left the coming helpless gen¬ 
eration. 

Far be it from me to convert a man into a mere 
sensualist, but if the ignoring of the sensual part of 
man ever yet has proved profitable I have been 
unable to hear from it. The sensuality of the human 
plasma is no doubt responsible for the ascent of man. 
The war on flesh and bio d is the cause of the de¬ 
scent (degeneration) thereof. If mere sensuality 
debases, as it no doubt does, mere spirituality demor¬ 
alizes. Decline is the result of either. For intel¬ 
lectual dishonesty is not sense, versatility of the semi¬ 
idiot not genius, deficiency ol sex not intellectuality, 
gall is not courage, cowardice or spite not moral sen¬ 
sibility, a great humbug is not a great scientist, man 
is riot an angel living on ether. Says the scribe ; 
“Physical enjoyment is not happiness.” In the 
name of all that is true under the sun, what is? 

Is it the building of air-castles of a golden, impos¬ 
sible perhaps ? Is it in racking your brains on the 


16 The Commo 7 i Scribe . 

impossibilities of the unknown and unknowable ? Is 
it in hoisting golden calves and false gods ? Is it in 
making war upon man’s physical nature? Is it in 
insanity and morbidity ? Is it in swapping lies ? If 
so the scribes and Pharisees would be the happiest 
people under the sun. But they are not. Misery is 
the cause of their policy. Despair is at the bottom 
of their hopeof immortality. Even the contentment 
they preach they have not got. Education and hap¬ 
piness plainly are strangers. Why ? Because the 
scribe and Pharisee’s insanity is at the bottom of 
the former. An educated fool and fool education 
are detrimental to physical enjoyment—happiness. 
In the despair of his addleheadedness he cries out 
"“O! that accursed materialism that believes in 
nothing but eating and drinking and being merry,” 
but in place of giving a useful or ornamental ideal, 
hoists up mischievous inanity; so that now the 
peaceful hours of rest are no more, night is turned 
into day, idiotic revelry is called pleasure, the 
almighty dollar the universal standard, the slavish 
faculties of the mind, the source of inspiration, 
weakness is refinement, the inventions of science 
become a curse and life is not worth living. The 
superhuman struggle for a crust of bread renders 
humanity helpless as an idiot and like a dry sponge 
absorbs the muddy water, so their intellects are 
compelled to imbibe the howlings and the wailings of 
those who know neither theory nor practice, who tol¬ 
erate no improvement, no criticism, no science, and 
with the cry, ‘‘Only fools will venture where 
angels fear to tread,” proclaim themselves guardian 


The Common Scribe. 


*7 


cherubs of society, Let “ society ” command; “No 
lady shall be seen walking about after dark by her¬ 
self,” and lo! thousands of women confined all day 
in dingy rooms and sorely in need of fresh air, will 
lock themselves into their homes of shoel and 
misery only to obey the command of a literary 
wretch who styles himself or herself “society.” 
Just mention the benefits of any physical enjoyment 
and lo! like a wolf attracted by the smell of blood, 
forth comes the city or rural scribe and wails worse 
then the banshee in his midnight keening, and 
asserts that man eats too much, man drinks too 
much, man sleeps too much, man rests too much, 
man revels too much, ad infinitum , ad yiauseam . 
What is the consequence ? Two thirds of the cases 
ol dyspepsia, anaemia, malaria, collapses and death, 
have their cause, in nothing else but insufficient phy¬ 
sical care. Two-thirds of the cases of insomnia and 
kindred horrors are traceable to an abstience from 
necessary sleep and perhaps more than half of all 
other complaints are only due to scribe and 
pharisee regulation. Alcohol, that valuable and 
pleasant disinfectant of the human anatomy, that 
microbe slayer, bacillus sickener, bacteria chaser and 
death germ annihilator, alcohol for which the human 
plasma craves like a drowning rat for a saving 
stick of wood, is in the language of the scribe, “a 
decoction of hell, a ri^er of filth reeking with the 
night soil of the damned,” and beer something 
dulling and stupefying intellects and ruining moral 
sensibilities. There is nothing worse on earth than 
“ licker,” nothing more hellish than “beer 


7 he Common Scribe . 


18 

guzzling ” and nothing can convince the scribe any 
better. Not even when miasma have eaten the vital 
principal out of his life-blood and port wine filtered 
into his bacteria reeking anatomy to prevent the 
premature, but well deserved collapse, at 
the eleventh hour, does he change his views. 
Whether prohibitionist or not he is forninst alcohol 
in some form or other with all his might and 
nothing but the totalest kind of abstinence can 
appease his wrath. In fact there is nothing benefi¬ 
cial under the sun to man, woman or child that the 
average scribe would not oppose with all his might 
and wipe out by total abstinence. What tears even 
Moses and the prophets, the Greeks and 
other ancient wine drinkers would weep 
could they but see these learned modern wise¬ 
acres and will-destroyers with their burden of 
doubly refined knowledge destroying every bless¬ 
ing of mankind despite the common sense of the 
people. It is astonishing how such supera¬ 
bundance of standard book-learning this day 
can result exactly in that state of mind that must 
have been peculiar to the serf in the 15th, 16th and 
17th centuries, when inquisition and kindred hells 
scattered death. The serf could not drink the wine 
he made but his Lord and master did it for him, the 
serf could not enjoy anything but restrictions, per¬ 
emptory orders, hard work and the lash of the ty¬ 
rant, and in consequence lost the capacity to enjoy. 
It was years after the release of the serf that they 
learned to enjoy life a little and gradually felt comfort¬ 
able without a scourge, a boss and his restrictions ; 


The Common Scribe. 


^9 


and here, under the light of the nineteenth century, 
turn up individuals who, after enjoying long years of 
freedom, are crying again for some restrictions in 
some form or other not because there is any harm 
done, only because the 'dilapidated mind wills it, 
and if they do not get them are wailing and moaning 
about “ the ruinous license and coming collapse.” 

What is the consequence ? Since sleep and food 
alone are not sufficient to support the human anat¬ 
omy in the superhuman struggle for existence, re¬ 
course must be had to medicine. And as the ex¬ 
penditure of human energy is greatest in the nerve 
circuit, nerve tonics are in demand—in violent de¬ 
mand—so that now the drug habit is the national 
vice of the Americans—if the craving for narcotic 
stimulants can be called a vice. But the drug habit, 
not even the chloride of gold habit, supports the 
system as does that “nasty, abominable, hellish, etc. 
tippling of wine.” No, indeed, ye of malice, 
grudge and bile, the baccillus or microbe living on 
nerve tissues and blood "corpuscles camps on the 
trail of the total abstainer and the chloride fiend. 
The pallor of their cheek, the loss of vitality, is the 
proof of insufficient support from the outside. 
Wrong rules of life by the carload emanate from the 
scribe and sucker generator. If his disciple rolls in 
the ditch, kicks his wife or makes an ass of himself 
by drinking alcohol, the idiot is to blame, not the 
stuff he drinks. Our will power is nothing else but 
nerve strength. The “I will” or “I won’t” de¬ 
pends only on a true perception or correct conception 
of the situation, but chiefly on nervous force to act. 


20 


The Common Scribe. 


There is no will with a weak, nervous system, how¬ 
ever clear the head. The excessive appetite lor li¬ 
quor besides is easily converted into an appetite for 
some other poison. If a half idiot knows that when 
“ drinking ” he is converted into a maniac* he may 
not be able to annihilate his appetite, but he can if 
he will abstain from insane conduct—this by the 
medicine route. If medicine-taking is no enjoy¬ 
ment, let those whom he annoys with idiotic con¬ 
duct attempt to furnish him the better fun, to 
which he is entitled. 

Alcohol in the form of beer or wine cannot be en¬ 
tirely eliminated from the household of the Caucas¬ 
ian, because it is a valuable aid to food rather than a 
medicine, if it is a poison. Wine and beer (lager) 
are superior to tea-poison as milk is superior to 
water. No human on earth can drink as much tea 
or coffee as he can wine or beer without injury. 
The nervous diseases of the latter two are not so hor¬ 
rible as those of the former. Many a headache, 
many an attack of typhoid fever, of insomnia, of 
V melancholia, suicide or dipsomania had for its foun¬ 
dation nothing else but a harmless, real nice cup o’ 
tea. Again, coffee is an angel in comparison with 
tea, which latter can only be enjoyed with impunity 
by an iron constitution. The redeeming feature of 
coffee only though is the aperient principle and its 
antiseptic qualities. This most forms of alcohol 
have too. But alcohol intoxicates. At least when 
the royal beast, man, has accumulated within him¬ 
self or inherited a quantity of Scribe and Pharisee 
spirituality he naturally has lost all the virtues of a 


The Common Scribe . 


21 


beast, and to “make an ass of himself” comes as 
natural as rolling off a log. Of course no ass, no 
dog, would be guilty of all the acts of~a drunken 
weakling, but such is the convenient phrase. 

Without going into scientific details I would ask 
what would be the consequence if all alcohol, all 
narcotics or other stimulants, were removed off the 
face of the earth ? Would the human race be happy 
without the appetite for nasty tobacco, or alcoholic 
swill, or snuff, betel, tea, coffee, cocoa, opium, mathe, 
etc. ? Would humanity be more healthy ? No, cer¬ 
tainly not. The richest kind of food would not pre¬ 
vent anaemia. Microbes and baccilli, which detest 
narcotic poison as sincerely as the scribe does, would 
rejoice at its expulsion and invade the human anat¬ 
omy wholesale, doctors and death would reap a rich 
harvest, disease and epidemics, perhaps the black 
death, the plague and malignant fevers would reap¬ 
pear. The crimes committed under the influence of 
“likker,” for which after all only the Scribe and 
Pharisees’ insane policy is responsible, would sink 
into insignificance in comparison with the mischief 
that must result from total abstinence of so-called 
“ stimulants.” 

But that is not all. The readiness and cheerful¬ 
ness with which the human plasma welcomes to its 
side noxious chemicals and the comfort, long or 
short, that follows tobacco, tea, coffee, wine, beer, 
etc., plainly proves, paradoxical as it may appear, 
that these are an aid to life and that the incessant 
warfare of death is suffering temporary defeat. 

The term “waste of tissue” is, after all, nothing 


22 


The Common Scribe. 


but disease's and death’s war on the life plasma. 
“Nerve-food,” “nerve-stimulant” are only disin¬ 
fectants. 

Show me a man of success in life and in good 
health and there is a man who has found his disin¬ 
fectant or disinfectants, be they beer, wine, tobacco, 
coffee, etc. 

Show me a man who is so good that he never 
touched a drop o’ likker or smoked a pipe or cigar, 
and there is a man who is not a success in life; in 
his valise is the quinine bottle and in his blood and 
heart is bile in great quantities. 

“Hardy races are total abstainers,” cries the 
scribe. Hardy and frugal races live in remarkably 
healthy countries, countries.so poor that they could 
not support a vigorous microbe or vicious bacillus. 
Hardy races besides abstain from the excessive nerve- 
expenditure of civilization. 

But 1 his every school-boy from his school hygiene 
knows, if the scribe himself does not. 

All good can be converted into evil. Malignity 
of disposition, ignorance and idiocy can turn a 
flower garden into a rubbish pile, but did you see a 
common scribe ever raise his. voice or use his pen to 
prevent this ? Is he not the champion of sack cloth 
and ashes by some route or other ? Is he not against 
most good and all the beautiful ? Is not almost every 
book written, every paper printed a defence of one 
or more of the six plagues of North America: The 
religious fantic, the law-making-demagogue, the 
unnatural f-male, the sweating monopolist, the 
yahoo hayseed and the microbe? 


The Common Scribe. 


23 


The six plagues are king of the proud United 
States. The scribes and pharisees are the guardian 
angels thereof. 

Says he: “ On paper we must ever dwell upon 
the noble, the pure and the beautiful in life, to 
make every reader better in heart, purer in soul and 
nobler in aspirations. ” 

What a blessing the scribe cannot make animals 
read his books. What a blessing the faithful draft 
mule cannot be filled with aspirations, whereby he 
become too noble to pull his load, too pure to eat in 
the same stall with ordinary draft animals and so 
“good” in heart that it kicks at every thing in 
sight. Starting out on an absurd ideal and elevated 
plane the scribe will hoist his victim higher yet 
until the latter hits the ceiling as a white cap or 
drops as a dupe or idiot to meet in disgust his 
sound, but fleshly fellow mortals, whom the elevated 
wretch needs must crusade against with all might 
forthwith and forever. 

The worst sin any scribe can commit is to convert 
our prepondering passion for the ornamental into 
pernicious subtlety and to neglect the already weak 
taste for the useful, as somethiug vulgar, worldly, 
unromantic, low. 

What is that “colonel,” “doctor,” “judge,” 
“ saint, ” or “ saviour” speaking at some meeting 
in favor of some crusade, the like of whitch has not 
been heard of so far under the sun, but a aggrega¬ 
tion of diabolical subtleties and gross ignorance? Who 
does not even know that one crusade necessitates 
another, that this year’s crusade against houses of 


H 


The Common Scribe . 


evil repute necessitates in two more years a crusade 
against vicious street boys; to-day’s prohibition 
victory causing next year shut-downs and street 
riots; this year’s war an infidel’s ripening; next year a 
revolt against church aggression. Subtlety is at no 
time equivalent to rugged honesty. Honesty 
is necessary to see the real truth. The ideal 
never is as true as the real; neither is refined decep¬ 
tion as “good ’’ as the truth. 

But anti-flesh and blood doctrine, prohibition of 
all alcohol and good diet, the war on sensuality and 
the execrable praise of spirituality are discarded 
now by some scribes and in their place appear fads, 
fancies and frauds not as coarse and plain as these, 
but equally as pernicious and just as far removed 
from science and truth as these. 

Every year the book-agent sallies forth and in¬ 
flicts on a long suffering public at high prices thick 
volumes which have no other object than to cater 
to those low parts of the human mind that became 
fixed in ages of barbarity and bondage, which every 
sane individual seeks now to outgrow. Not a word of 
progress or betterment, not a line of truth or science, 
golden inanity, golden hopes of a golden nothing, 
golden love for a golden calf. Pagan ideas of virtue, 
savage notions of honor and pure words of religion 
flavored sentiment are thrown by a “true friend’ ’ in 
big chunks into the open mouth of the free moral hay¬ 
seed agency. 

Every week the great metropolitan and the small 
patent inside newspapers polish up the sharp and 
cutting lines of pitiless caste in the society col- 


The Common Scribe . 


25 


umns, so that the suicidal fool-standard of the 
“ swim ” may be perpetuated, no matter if the lead¬ 
ing society lady catches tubercolosis from confine¬ 
ment to her room, not having the necessary gown 
for a placard write-up, In place of using the 
“swim” as noble examples of the art of pleasant 
life without debt, pistol shots, divorces and diseases, 
the society-man and society-woman are turned 
through idiotic laudatory notices into high-perched, 
useless members of the community. Noblesse~oblige 
is not known in all America. There is not a book on 
etiquette prin.ed that has science and truth for its 
foundation, but savage customs, ancient ceremony, 
and anti-flesh and blood taste form the source of 
regulation. Gravy must be eaten with a fork, the 
knife in your mouth is an unpardonable sin. 
The lady must be a dummy, and the gentleman a 
regulated corpse. Leave your spoon in the coffee 
and you are not used to the ways of the beau monde . 
Take it out and “ polite society ’ ’ decrees you are 
ignorant of their ways. Introduce yourself to a lady 
and lo ! you have transgressed an “ unwritten law 
and deserve to be shot. In fact the lawlessness car¬ 
ried on under the title of unwritten law is the 
scribe’s special profession. When that fails he is 
instrumental in making written ones. When empty 
fancies, fads and frauds have failed to efficiently gum 
up man’s understanding then the lawless Scribe is 
converted into a shrieking regulation mill. That 
every law is more or less a crime against the defeated 
minority does not bother him in the least. There are 
laws enough now already on the statute books to- 


26 


The Common Scribe. 


land every private citizen in the state, however up¬ 
right, at least once in jail if not in the penitentiary. 
For a simple “cuss-word,” or for holding special 
opinions without the special license, the most hon¬ 
est individual only needs an enemy to be accused, 
convicted and sentenced. Yet every year the rural 
as well as the city scribe clamours aloud for more 
law. More law for vicious morality, more law to 
down capital, more law to restrict inalienable rights, 
more law in favor of the pope, priest and parsoncraft, 
more law in favor of lazy and fanatic women, more 
anti-divorce law, more laws against defenseless fallen 
women, more law in favor of the genteel bum or 
sweater, more law to make every country postmaster 
supreme judge of the morals of the people, more law 
to feed the government and judicial graces, more 
law against joy and welfare, laws against peace, hap¬ 
piness and life without end. Those simple words 
of that great man of truth in England : 

“Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided 
he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man ” 
are not known, not recognized, or if recognized, cur¬ 
tailed by the scribe in the “ might (majority) makes 
right” rule. 

The words : 

“ Each individnal shall receive the benefits and evils of 
its own nature and its subsequent conduct ” 

are totally ignored. Nay, worse vigorously objected 
to, and worse yet objected in favor of some accursed 
false and pernicious dogma of an 'ignorant but glib 
fanatic. No doubt science might retalliate by 
law and forbid the anti-vivisectionist to open his 


A Moral Scribe . 


;?7 


croaking mouth, or a vegetarian from demoralizing 
his anatomy, or the anti-man fiend from manufact¬ 
uring weak men, or the anti-capital punishment ad¬ 
vocate from cultivating murder and mawkish senti¬ 
mentality. But they, who never invented one useful 
thing to benefit mankind, they who never discovered 
one single moral truth to “save” humanity, they 
whose panaceas are lies, whose remedies are malice, 
whose deeds are on paper, are in the majority, the 
sworn enemy of ‘ ‘ tearing down literature, ’ ’ the sworn 
and victorious enemy of science in any form. The 
vicious majority would make the task hopeless. 
For the scientific facts that even a Zola or a Dumas 
lays bare so true to nature without varnish for the 
benefit of the yahoo arouse his ire, he “ must ever 
protest,” etc., and of course with him other plainer 
science ‘‘is not science. ’ ’ 


A MORAL SCRIBE. 

The bridge between the common scribe and the 
moral one is perhaps Plato, B. C. 429-347. Here is 
an honored individual who plainly did not care to 
know that man’s spirituality depends entirely on 
how many square meals he or his ancestors assimi¬ 
lated and that an immense amount of spirituality 
lay concealed in the acres of dirt the peas and beans 
of their diet were raised on, yet he did not hesitate 
to say in substance: “ Reduce your earthly nature 
and you will become spritual. Your body is by 



28 


A Moral Scribe . 


nature base, brutalized. Cheat it all you can until 
you acquire immortality. The more you subdue 
your clamorous body the more spiritual and immortal 
you will become. 

Spiritual and immortal meant then as it does now, 
in Americnn parlance, “ no account for the present, 
past or future; decayed, dead.” 

There were people, of course, who objected to 
becoming permaturely immortal, but they objected 
to their sorrow and were sat upon like the deer is 
by the blood hound, for said the disciples of Plato, if 
you will not subueyour body yourself we will do it 
for you. Body subduing in Plato’s time, it will be 
seen, was the glorious occupation of the scribe, with 
the exception perhaps that this was not yet called 
morality. For virtue meant excellence, as it ever 
only should mean, and not “no accountness, ” as it 
more or less means to-day. 

Whether Plato was one of the first scribes preach¬ 
ing unscientific doctrines or not, certain it is that 
countless individuals sprung up after him, and con¬ 
trary to fact and evidence, preached on eternal exis¬ 
tence founded on universal no-accountness of the 
human body. One fictitious literary creation suc¬ 
ceeded another until finally to reach a climax this 
pernicious doctrine was announced as the word of 
God or some supreme being, and to crown all, a 
series of historical novels were written in 
which the universal scribe’s ideal men, who 
had preached uselessness and immortality as the 
best utility, were either crucified or beheaded, 
and passed off as prophets or sons of God in sub- 


A Moral Scribe . 


29 


sequent novels to the intense satisfaction of.all the 
scribes and Pharisees of then and for years to come, 
The scribe’s worst transgression, the bible, had 
appeared, A transgression that has caused more 
wars, wounds, tortures, agonies, tyrannies, cruelties, 
barbarities and worst of all, the increase of mental 
darkness and melancholy, physical degeneration of 
the white race from their former great advance and 
splendor, where the true, the beautiful and the 
good only were worshipped. The bible, the book 
of contradictions and thinly scattered fragments of 
science, is the one cloud that has wrecked the 
happiness of the whole race, even the agony and 
frenzy of despair of its victims cannot be said to 
have formed a stepping stone to advancement, for 
the present advancement is due to a healthy, 
vigorous climate in northern Europe, in 
which the scribes cannot enervate the individual 
or annihilate the energy of the human body. Bracing 
air, abundant oxygen, abundant food are mightier 
than the word of God. But even in Europe, where 
the human family’s highest point of energy, i. e., 
deepest thought and brain perfection, was reached, 
the miserable work of the scribe is visible. There 
among the fairest and most powerful races, stunted 
growth, ugly, worried, agonized features, pale and 
pinched taces, hunchbacks, cripples, sickly mothers 
with sickly infants, and worse effects of wrong teach¬ 
ing, i. e., work of the Scribes and Pharisees are vis¬ 
ible. 

Where the Bible has lost its hold there the scribes 
and Pharisees wreck, tarnish, besmirch and revile 


3° 


A Moral Scribe. 


under the banner of morality. The moral scribe 
defends two kinds of morality. One is rabbit-warren 
morality and the other Anthony Comstock morality. 
The former is to secure the bridleless breeding in¬ 
stinct of the women regardless of consequences, the 
latter is to curb or annihilate the propogating in¬ 
stinct in man and foster unnatural appetites. The 
latter kind is the thing in America, while the former 
is law in Europe. Doctor bills and untold suffer¬ 
ings are the consequence of either. The cause and 
spread of rabbit-warren morality in Europe are the 
different warring nationalities. It is the direct con¬ 
sequence of competition of the different nationali¬ 
ties. 

For the fool idea is still existing whichever na¬ 
tion is numerically the largest is likely to survive 
as the fittest. Thus different nationalities are the 
direct cause of the governmental enforcement of this 
morality. Now and then the poet-scribe will get in 
his awful work and fiendishly fire up patriotism. 
The consequence of fired-up patriotism is invariably 
war. When there is war the flower of the land is 
killed, then the scribe and Pharisee rejoices by the 
column. For the noblest flesh and blood is blown 
to atoms and inferior beings remain. 

Anthony Comstock morality used to be called 
Puritanism. And purity is often the flag it sails un¬ 
der. Purity will be perhaps the future excuse of 
the Scribes and Pharasees’ vicious practice when 
Platoism, Bible folly and morality have worked their 
mischief and have been shelved in disgust. Com¬ 
stock morality can only thrive among people whose 


A Moral Scribe. 


3i 


higher functions, such as reason, or the faculty that 
unerringly detects the true, the beautiful and the 
good, have never been developed, who have lived a 
ife of slavery aud environment, whether of conven¬ 
tionality or backwoods hermitage. 

Anthony Comstock’s morality is the morality of 
nearly all semi-civilized nations' The life-long 
veiled Turkish woman, the butchering of female 
slaves in Africa, the burning of widows in India, fe¬ 
male outcast mills and outcast bleeding in Christian 
communities, and almost all etiquette and conven¬ 
tionality are evidences of barbarous purity notions, 
some of which may spring from downright ignorance 
but far more really are the offspring of sexual 
deficiency, nervous decay, intellectual weakness 
wrought through Scribe and Pharisee civilization 
than jealousy or selfishness of the white-necktie bar¬ 
barian. Great is the Scribe when he arises as a 
heaven-appointed, exalted institution to defend his 
moral laws or heathen notions of purity. Mighty 
is his wrath when some brother Scribe violates the 
unwritten laws of literary propriety. What the lat¬ 
ter is, no Scribe on earth has yet been able to define. 
But it can be nothing else but the professor’s bow 
to the ourang-outang, the respectful removal of the 
scholar’s hat when passing the golden calf, the sci¬ 
entist kissing the well-worn breech-clout of the liter¬ 
ary acrobat, the blackmail levied by the Scribes and 
Pharisees. Unless perhaps indeed it is a different 
form of devil worship explained later on. (See Phar¬ 
isees). 

But rabbit-warren and Anthony Comstock moral- 


3 * 


A Moral Scribe. 


ity are not only a vice of the Scribes and Pharisees 
to degenerate mankind. It serves as an excel¬ 
lent weapon to inflict pain and misery on sin¬ 
gle individuals by the daily press, to raise an 
immense amount of scandal or public opinion stink 
in almost any direction, against isolated, defenceless 
individuals. This is only possible where heathen 
moral ideas have been successfully engrafted and 
the violation of which creates the sensation, the 
shock or the bad smell only according to the 
amount of absence or presence of mental discern¬ 
ment of the truth. It is here where “ telling the 
truth” may become libel. To tell disagreeable 
truths alone is often a more serious crime than 
telling disagreeable lies, but not a day passes in 
which some scribe does tell neither a damaging lie 
nor an injurious truth, but with ingenious word¬ 
play disparages, debases Or villainizes some defence¬ 
less individual in pursuit of happiness. No real truth 
or real lie is told but a stink is created. Such must 
be called stinking the crime of stinking. When people 
are mentally perfect the average sensation in the 
daily papers itself would not shock them the conduct 
of the scribe only would. The stink would not be en¬ 
joyed and the stinker would be despised. Neither 
would sleuthhound tactics of the scribe elevate him 
in the social scale, for the real criminals against the 
peace and happiness of the community—nay human¬ 
ity, are not sent to jail. For what is most law but 
seventy-five per cent, of red tape manufactured at 
a great expense by scribe and pharisee knowl¬ 
edge to restrain the toilers and the needy and to 


A Moral Scribe. 


33 


deny them the mote of happiness they might be en¬ 
titled to. Nine-tenths of the lawmakers are 
nothing else but the direct product of the moral 
scribe. Educated in McGuffey’s Fifth reader, 
Cushing’s manual in his pocket, all the lawmaker 
needs is only to uphold the moral ideas of the scribe, 
and on the back of damnable precedent he can ride 
personal rights and liberty to lawful death. A 
charge of obtaining money under false pretenses is 
never entered against him. Right honorable is 
his title. The scribe makes him just the same as 
he calls an individual making soap pills, accord¬ 
ing to time-honored prescription, a member of the 
faculty of medical science. No matter it such indi¬ 
vidual did not possess science enough to distinguish 
cause from effect or effect from cause, as much as 
the average mule does. 

Nature herself is immoral. Life goes on 
regardless of the saddest consequences. Only 
the scribe is full of morals; morals, too, that 
are not founded on anything high. The green-eyed 
monster glares between every line that hss been 
written about sexual morality. Read the scribe’s 
moral regulations to a decrepid old rooster in the 
yard and he will naturally agree that all young 
roosters should be restrained with all might. Not 
because it does any good only because it is such 
intense satisfaction to him who is old and decrepid. 
In fact, if the former could be condemned to celibacy 
a la Tolstoi or Fowler, the satisfaction of the 
decrepid old wretch would be all thei greater. Dogs 
even avenging the insults offered to the females of 


31 


A Moral So ibe . 


their kind in the street, is another parallel to the 
selfishness called morality, The victor of course 
feels elevated. 

Epicurus’ or Senecas law : 

“So use present pleasures as not to -lessen those which 
are to come.” 

The true foundation of all true virtue and 
morality is cunningly concealed so that the 
low, barbarious passions of grudge and bile may have 
full play. What a terrible howl the scribe can raise 
though when occasionally a police inspector 
informs him of the pure End steady increase 
of immorality in the higher ranks of society. 
How he wails, groans, anathemizes and predicts the 
fall of the great western republic just because his 
beastly and insane morality is openly discarded and 
a humane course of life pursued. And scalding 
tears run down his cheek when he sees the oppor¬ 
tunity for .secret vice disappearing among the better 
classes. 

We are well aware how every coquettish wave of 
the maiden’s fan, her delicate shrug of the shoulders, 
the picking to pieces of the other girl, her prohibi¬ 
tion tendencies, her preacher admiration, her faith 
in fool religions, her suspicious glance at science, 
the quarrel with her lover, the pouting lip, the code 
of chalkline, the expensive hat, her keen sense of 
respectability, her tightened waist, is only prompted 
by her veiled instinct or passion to successful^ in¬ 
cubate—if such an expression is permissable—and 
far be it from me to deny any woman, either sick, 
lame or criminally inclined, her inalienable right to 


A Moral Scribe . 


35 


maternity, for her all of happiness depends upon it, 
and our deepest sympathy will ever be with those 
unfortunates whom Scribe and Pharisee villainy 
condemned to a life of celibacy or who are greeted 
with vile epithets because they failed to restrain the 
imperative clamoring of their nature. But the de¬ 
desire for maternity is after all only as beastly a 
passion as man’s carnal perfidy. We are well aware 
that on woman’s right to maternity hinges our heaven 
or our hell. However here is the great moral knot 
most difficult to untie. Nature is only qualified to set 
the bounds to that right, not the Scribe. If nature 
permits a healthy preventive of further conception, 
then that is a boundary which must be pointed out, 
by science perhaps best by the medical faculty, who 
in their abominable cowardliness have shirked that 
burning point worse than the Scribe or Pharasee. 
The cold blooded theory of too much comfort in 
these times of struggle for something to eat is ab¬ 
surd. Natural women will never abuse this boon of 
science on account of their inborn longing for the joys 
of maternity. But it should be made an open secret, 
lest secret vice take hold, or where lies the danger 
of sexual precocity but in unnatural nervous waste ? 
If sexual precocity has made its appearance ye who 
know more than the students of anatomy remember 
no editorials, no confinement, no restriction, no pun¬ 
ishment, no imprecation, no bugaboo, no disease 
not death will stop it, it is there come to stay and 
the only remedy is to give to man what belongs to 
man, to woman what belongs to her, regardless of 
bogus etiquette, fool morality or hop-scotch marriage 


3<> 


A Moral Scribe. 


licenses. For this is the only correct way of pre¬ 
serving the energy of the human race. The rest is 
false, cruel, cussed, cowardly and disastrous. It is 
horrible to behold the wrecks ol human life both di¬ 
rect and indirect who must be laid to the door of the 
moral Scribe who represents nothing else but the di¬ 
lapidated remains of an ill-spent existence begrudg¬ 
ing the coming generation a life of health and happi¬ 
ness. Woman’s passion to incubate no doubt should 
be held sacred but when it is for the purpose of mod¬ 
ern slavery and for revenue only to fill the pockets 
of the real estate owner, it is time to call a halt much 
less insisting on an unlimited exercise of it. It is 
safe to say that ten years from now the words of Mrs. 
Thorton Smith, published in the London Times- 
Kcho, July 18, 1891, will fit the whole American 
continent: 

“There is that terrible weltering mass of humanity in 
our courts and alleys, where the degradation, the poverty, 
the misery of mothers and children alike sicken the better 
placed woman whose duties taking her amongst them be¬ 
comes acquainted with their sorrows and their needs. In 
these dingy, over-crowded dwellings, maternity is looked 
forward to with dread, and the expected child is a curse. 
It Is these wretched, overburdened women we must reach 
—women who, dwarfed in intellect, stunted in growth, go 
on helplessly producing year after year miserable, unwel¬ 
come children, to swarm half naked, starved and filthy, in 
the gutters, a curse to themselves, a blot on our boasted 
civilization, and a menace to society. There are in Lon¬ 
don alone 16,000 who have murdered their offsprings, and 
those moralists who fall a-cursing at the dissemination of 
neo-Malthusian doctrines, if they are untouched by the 
poverty, the hunger and the disease, may well stand silent 
in the face of the crime. ” 


A Moral Scribe . 


37 


And the scribe who is now so incensed at man’s 
“ perfidy” will see the extent of disasters wrought 
by delending only woman’s bestiality and heaping 
curses on that of man’s. 

It is ridiculous to hear of the wails “why men do 
not marry?” when we know the incessant warfare 
the scribes and pharisees have made on the “ besti¬ 
ality of man,” Why should they marry when their 
best days, the bloom of all of that is glorious is 
spent in useless waste. The time will come if their 
senseless abominable warfare on the “ brutal ” pas 
sion of man is continued, when men, who in former 
times were almost perfect specimens of manhood and 
made up of everything that must be called true virt¬ 
ue and excellence, are turned into nothing else but 
shiftless, pill-taking, growling, grumbling celibates, 
whose highest ambition in life is to jump a board- 
bill. Who do not care for a woman, because they 
had never been near one, whose whole sexual outfit 
is atrophied or undeveloped, who can only see beauty 
in a billiard cue and pleasure in a stag-brawl. Who, 
when they accidentally do marry, turn out only jeal¬ 
ous, miserable, wife-killing Posdnyschefifs, not Tru- 
chatscheffs who are their superiors (Kreutzer Sonata), 
This element in the United States is increasing as 
also are corresponding ad.’s for weak men. And 
who is to blame? Not they. But the moral scribe 
whether male or female, who reduces “passion.’’ 
It looks almost preposterous that there should be 
found in this world human beings even in petticoats 
who, honestly too, make war on all that is good in 
man. Yet in America such there are. The Arena 


A Moral Scribe . 


for August, 1891, alone contains an article that will 
sour thousands of men’s good intentions and give 
woman, whether “ of age of consent ” or not, a wide 
berth and drop like a hot potatoe forever any female 
that entertains Similar opinions. 

The whole rural area of the United States, includ¬ 
ing the smaller towns, except perhaps Louisiana, is 
one howling waste in which the atrophied anti-pas¬ 
sion fiend is king, and even in large towns married 
women hold meetings and cavot around to knife her 
frail sister or castrate her erring (?) brother. 

One shudders at the amount of cold blood manu¬ 
factured by the scribes’ anti passion league. In the 
South and West, or anywhere where the female sa¬ 
loon-smasher dwells, some of the fairest flowers of the 
land, as the scribe is pleased to call a senseless, per¬ 
verted snuff-dipping sisterhood, will swear out an 
“affivavy” for love-making and upon “ the suit be ng 
pressed” will not shrink at all from causing a man 
to be hung to a tree by the ‘ 4 enraged citizens ’ ’ for 
insult. Remorse, shame, compassion, the touch of 
a tender spring* of a a feminine better self is totally 
unknown. Joyless days of life are the results, celi¬ 
bates on the increase and the end is not yet. 

For not long ago a pharisee law-maker in the 
Texas legislature defined rape not as in Webster’s 
dictionary, a carnal knowledge by fraud or force, 
against a moman’s will, but the same without either 
and with her consent, providing she be under cer¬ 
tain years of age—such an act punishable with 
death. Other states have similar laws already 
where the punishment is nearly as severe. Think 


A Moral Scribe. 


39 


of it, young man, before you blow your brains om, 
that that which nature designed for you in great 
abundance, a miserable, discrepid old wretch afflict¬ 
ed with everything that is narrow and contracted 
willfully and wantonly makes a matter of life and 
death. 

In Europe if a man overcomes a woman’s pernicity, 
if he is not exactly given a gold medal, is hardly ever 
indicted, and only in aggravated cases, given from 
six months to two years imprisonment. Nor is the 
husband entitled in any civilized country to kill his 
wife’s paramour as he is in Texas, according to the 
criminal code But such a husband’s neck gets his 
six-foot hell-jerk the same as any other murderer’s. 

With some Scribes that hatred of all sexual pas¬ 
sion seems to know only one boundary and their 
doctrine is ; “ The sexual act should only be com¬ 

mitted for the purpose of procreation.” To these I 
can only say: Woman can be made pregnant arti¬ 
ficially and without committing this obnoxious act 
at all. Invest some renowned physician by the state 
with power to do this and the scribe can have indi¬ 
viduals made to order and according to an approved 
of special low down standard. This will give the 
Scribe and Pharasee power over all mankind and do 
away with all “bestiality” being the acme of all 
morality and exceedingly proper. For the material 
go to Anthony Comstock. 

The question of health no Scribe ever agitated. 
Perhaps because he never knew what such is and in 
all earnest I ask, Who is healthy ? Is it the man 
who lives according to the standard set by the Scribes 


A Moral Scribe. 


to 

and Pharasees ? Or is it the man who sums up his 
earthly joys with wine, wife and song? Is it the 
hollow eyed, sunken-cheeked, pale individual of 
morality, or is it the gay and vigorous denizen of 
the world ? Is that man healthy who enjoys him¬ 
self, or is he who impotently gnashes his teeth at joy 
or joviality ? Does the puritan achieve as much as 
the anti-puritan ? Remember, intemperance or de¬ 
bauchery bring their prompt punishment which can 
not be escaped, and after duly considering all, yes 
all, the Scribe’s ideal individual is not the healthiest, 
nor the best, nor the strongest, and worst of all not 
the individual that has sense. For it is not he who 
employs his muscle that becomes weak, nor he who 
exercises his nervous system rationally who collapses 
and fills the insane asylum, but the total abstainer, 
the kill-joy, the moralist, the anti-passion fiend who 
furnishes a useless abomination making life hideous. 
Then there is that question of good looks. Says 
the New York World end of July, 1891 : 

“ When Mme. Sara, as the great and only Bernhardt pre- 
ferrs to be called, came back to America last season look¬ 
ing fatter and fairer, but absolutely younger, than she did 
ten years ago, everybody wondered how she had managed 
to achieve such an appearance in spite of the exigencies 
of her life. 

“ Half a score of very tranquil years seldom fail to in¬ 
scribe a few records in wrinkles and crowsfeet, when once 
the boundaries of first youth have passed, But here was 
a woman well on in middle life, a mother and grandmother, 
whom a most unusual stress of work, dissipation and fa¬ 
tiguing travel had left free from the footprints of time. In 
fact, the yeajs had brought gifts instead of levying taxes, 


A Moral Scribe . 




“In speaking to a young actress of her fatigue after long, 
exacting rehearsals, Mme. Bernhardt said that she found 
unfailing refreshment from the use of an Eau Sedative, 
with which she is bathed from head to foot whenever ex¬ 
cessively tired.” 

The eausedative plainly is not a druggist’s pre¬ 
scription but ti e result of drinking the cups of life 
with little simpering and not total abstaining. 
There are numberless Saras’ every where. Men, 
likewise, preserved their youth by living and avoid¬ 
ing grave-yard tactics. 

And the heiress who with thousands of dollars lying 
idle, drifts intentionally towards paralizing spinster- 
hood, need not be astonished when cosmetics and 
an extremely virtuous life bring her early decay and 
the watery, bleared eyes of the melancholiac, and the 
frown of jouth on man’s brutal passions will cer¬ 
tainly be re aid in later years with a wrinkle that 
might not have been. But she is not to blame. 

Who is it that lauds petticoat perversity as 
divinity and sows with it ideas of female superiority 
that are false ? The moral seribe. With a moral 
whip he herds women on one side and congregates 
men on the other, ever separate, the natural gulf 
ever unnaturally widened till now according to the 
laws of evolution the process of unsexing has 
commenced. That means to say the women loose 
their charm, the men their higher faculties of mind. 
Even the shape of women being altered in the 
short course of a few years of separation from the 
men, so that once a figure of Venus will shrink into 
the shape of an undeloped boy, simply because the 


A Mora) Scribe. 


4 2 

blood being no more circulated in the parts that 
heip to beautify women, nourishment will not 
take place and atrophy result ; lor the many 
shaky, shackly, timid, nervons, lean, gaunt, fat and 
flabby, but divine women blame nobody but the 
moral scribe. It is he that whispered in her ear; 
“You are mans superior, you are worth your own 
price,” and thus with unduly exalted opinion, 
estranged man’s companion until now chumminess 
is no more; a womanly feminine spirit a rarity, and 
the true source of happiness at an end. Man can 
buy a woman for longer or shorter matrimony at an 
extortionate price. Man may keep a woman at a 
fabulous sacrifice for a longer or shorter period, but 
let his pocket be found wanting and there is a 
divorce, or its equivalent, disgust and indifference. 
The moral scribe’s divine creature, scorns such 
things as a sacrifice, likening a man because he is 
a man, or duty towards, male anything. Divine 
wretches even now organize to claim more right to 
their own bodies, to cultivate sexual deficiency and 
strike higher bargains. Of course if a women can 
obtain happiness by making baloon ascensions, or 
taking the veil, or the stump, shining as an angel or a 
monstrousity and ignoring man, all right, but let her 
bear in mind when she ignores her natural destiny, 
she ignores the main road to happiness. It is im¬ 
possible to tell how much more useless women can 
get to be if they once try and the men let them. 
Wonderful specimens of petted, respected and adored 
divine, useless, nay dangerous, females no doubt 
will soon be exhibited in the museum of foreign 


A Moral Scribe . 


43 


countries, as moral curiosities Just as the scientist 
cultivates microbes perhaps it would be best to cul¬ 
tivate a few such specimens of the scribe’s most 
approved of divine, high-perched, antagonistic, 
pattern as an ideal and useful horrible example. 
Of course it is antisensuality only that creates a 
modern affliction unheard of elsewhere on this earth. 
The ideal and Platonic love sermons being landed 
as so lasting, spiritual and refining and which 
results so often in idiotic conduct, untold silent 
agony, pistol shots, the morgue or a blasted life too 
have their share, perhaps the larger one, and the 
prayer ‘ ‘ to prevent us from falling deeply into love ’ ’ 
uttered by some sensible persons is a gospel that is 
well worth to consider, It is the gospel of rigid con¬ 
tinence that results, besides pugnacity, grievances 
maffias, clan-na-gsels, white-caps, bald-knobbers and 
feuds, in the violent monomania called love, the 
roue, the debauchee, although to be despised for the 
absence of better attributes, and too the married 
man, escapes to a greater extent platonic temporary 
insanity and the mental rack and torture necessarily 
accompanying under the conventional tyranny of 
our civilization or our scribes. Anybody knows 
that platonic love returned on $8 a week is terrible, 
the same on $2,000 a year unreturned, or with some 
other fellow, sheol. 

It is true all that woman’s nature ever craved for 
is only platonic love by the hogshead, bushel or the 
ton. Woman does not care a straw for the carnal 
article. If man will not give her platonic affection 
she will obtain it from a poodle dog,or a pig, it does 


u 


A Moral Scribe . 


not matter which, as long as the ‘ ‘ odious carnality” 
is not mixed with it. Of course this trait of the fe¬ 
male character is perfectly excusable ; it is perfectly 
right; her successful maternity is at the bottom¬ 
most bottom of it if she does herself deny that. ‘ ‘Who 
will care for mamma and the baby if father does not 
truly love mamma ” is expressed plainly in the kiss 
she gives the nasty poodle dog, and the men of thi s 
commonwealth nor any other cannot escape the burden 
of paternity or the expense of Lordship of creation. 
But if man is woman’s keeper, is woman merely a 
toy that is kept ? Did nature bring her up for noth¬ 
ing else but a senseless pose, an empty thing, a 
dead drag, whose mission only is to incubate ? She 
plainly has another mission outside of plying the lever 
of matrimonial coercion. That mission is carnal 
usefulness, if anything. 

To cultivate platonic love and exclusively for reve¬ 
nue only results at best in a shoddy article and only 
because its counterpart, the carnal is absent. The 
moral scribe tells woman to occupy the rocking 
chair while he apples the knife, shears, sclapel and 
axe to man’s carnal affection. It is he that manu¬ 
factures the shirk, wrongly called the seducer. It is 
he that lashes the fallen women and bids her to rob 
men. It is he that tells the “ virtuons ” women not 
to run after the men, but to wait eternal. It is he 
that stints carnal affection so that in the event of 
matrimony the green-eyed monster a la Kreutzer 
Sonata makes its appearance. It is he who through 
abstinence converts the induced and freed energy of 
our bodies into the lowest passions, such as the 


A Moral Scribe. 


45 

green-eyed monster, puritanism and Jack the Rip¬ 
per sexual aberrations. 

Under the present influence of the moral scribe 
really no man is to blame for seduction. For it 
is not right that any fair and square healthy man 
should pay two weeks’ wages for hugging a poor or 
dangerous article in the slums, when a superabun¬ 
dance of feminine affection runs to wanton waste. 
The successful seducer rather deserves commenda¬ 
tion for overcoming a female flint-hearted shirk, and 
to be hung only for failing to protect her in a 
knightly style (rom the attacks of scribe, pharisee, 
yap and Postnycheff. If women have their rights, 
men have theirs too. But if ever there has been yet 
a moral scribe that sought to affect a compromise 
we have not heard of him. His office in every line 
he writes, is to increase man’s wrongs, woman’s 
faults and assure for both a melancholy fiasco. “I’ll 
not defend social leprosy,” cries he. Yet there is 
the identical spots which both scribe and Phar see 
will not permit to either be scrubbed or healed, but 
they eternally insist on having it botched up to 
poison for the sake of propriety. Not one line yet 
has been written by any scribe to elevate, protect or 
improve the frail sisterhood, but like a genuine bru¬ 
tal ignoramus, he can only hurl vile' epithets at the 
superior of his kind. 

Not a day passes in which the best thing 
on earth is not aired like a putrid object of the dis¬ 
secting table by the moral scribe with apparently no 
other purpose than to expose his total ignorance and 
and immense malice, to disgust mankind in general 


4 6 


A Moral Scribe. 


and to kill passion. Writes the chief moral scribe 
aud president of the society for increasing secret 
vice: “It is both lamentable and disheartening 
* * * that we should have an epidemic of 

lewdness through the channels of light literature.” 
The fact that lewd light literature is in demand at 
all proves that there is something very rotten and 
totally wrong. Why should the country lad call 
for something flashy to read or the town-boy search 
for something spicy with illustrations to match, in 
a book shop ? 

Why do they not admire the original, the heroines 
of their daily life, which must be superior to a poor 
pen-picture imitation ? Why don’t they study some¬ 
thing flashy or talk something spicy with the females 
of their surroundings? No Jew, no Frenchman, no 
German, no Englishman, no Chinaman, no nigger, 
no beast would prefer a distorted counterfeit to the 
real article. If you doubt this, try them. ^ It is 
true some young men do really get disgusted at the 
pictures for instance found at the end of Frank Les¬ 
lie' s Budget. Bnt it is the disgust of the lunatic at 
rationality or of the fox at the sour grapes. The 
cause for demand for anything like lewd literature 
can only be the fenced up condition of femininity, 
fool etiquette, fool respectability, fool honor and 
fool education. The boys want something, they 
don’t know what. The women are fenced up, the 
frail sisterhood is too expensive and too dangerous 
to health, so he searches for a lewd picture or spicy 
book. He perhaps is fully aware that these do not 
fill the bill, but a bread pill is often better than no 


A Moral Scribe , 


47 


me licine at all. Femininity is the boys’ best med¬ 
icine. The boys know it. The moral Scribe ap¬ 
parently does not. The existence of moral literature, 
moral fiends and moral fools is the proof of rotton- 
ness as sure as the sight of the buzzard proves the 
presence of carrion. 

We cannot deny that the United States’ complaint 
of lost manhood and worse yet lost womanhood is 
not in every case induced by the Scribe. But he 
does all in his power to aggravate and perpetuate it. 
^Neurasthenia, with or without insomnia, is a United 
States complaint. The highest English and German 
medical authorities in all their writings reveal only 
a vague idea of what commonly is called nervous 
exhaustion. Of course nervous exhaustion is a 
Scribe term, not a scientific one. Exhaustion, espe¬ 
cially of a nervous kind, is not tolerated by nature 
for more than a few hours, is impossible, or its name 
at least is death. It might be called “straining 
your capacity,” but that is a poor term, for no man 
can lift more than he is able to, nobody can think 
more or longer than his mental make up will per¬ 
mit, besides all overwork is readily and speedily 
cured by rest. This being the case, you might as 
well call “fatigue” exhaustion. But again, “ em¬ 
ployment ”*is the cure of “loss of vitality.” It is 
a notorious fact that in nervous exhaustion judicious 
nervous application is the first remedy. What is 
the second ? Poisons. Such as phosphorus, bella 
donna, strychnine, arsenic, quinine, alcohol, etc. 
What are the poisons for ? To revive ? Not by any 
means. They are to kill. Kill what? The exhaust- 


A Moral Scribe. 


ed state ? No. But some other poison plainly, which 
proves that exhaustion of vitality is not exactly ex¬ 
haustion, but the action of a poison, and also an alive 
poison. And it is further plain, lor reasons which 
are unnecessary here to state, that the ’live poison is 
introduced into the body from the outside and not 
generated inside, as the medical practitioner so iondly 
hopes. For diaphoratics and diuretics not even ben¬ 
zoic soda furnish relief. This poison, whether it be 
called ptomaine, bacillus, microbe or bacteria is the 
cause of fatigue staying fatigue, exhaustion becom¬ 
ing analagous to exhaustion and preventing the 
body from getting rest or recovery. This poison, 
seems to be nowhere else on the globe but only east 
of the Rocky Mountains of the United States, at¬ 
tacks the sick and healthy alike, and it attacks only 
the nervous outfits of the human anatomy. That 
brain and nerve which is nourished by little, poor or 
waste-charged blood it apparently makes its home. 
The medical profession call it neurasthenia, some¬ 
times migrane, and seek to cure it with electricity, 
cold baths, massage, poisons and denser air pressure. 
But so far, up to date, have only succeeded in giv¬ 
ing relief, not effecting a complete cure. The in¬ 
somnia feature of it is annihilated or rather counter¬ 
acted, though by producing the necessary nocturnal 
brain anaemia by applying a hot iron at bedtime for 
a few minutes to the back of neck and spine This, 
to the scandal of the medical profession be it said, 
nine-tenths of the doctors do not know, but hypnotics 
like chloral-amid, phenacetin, sulphonal, caffeine, 
opium, etc., are administered without real benefit in 
true orthodox fanatical style. f 


A Moral Scribe . 


49 


This United States animal or vegetable nerve 
poison is no doubt one cause of the total difference 
of the American from other species of humanity. 
It is the primary cause of Puritanism and general 
disgust of everything sexual. It is one cause of 
the animosity and loathing women have for men, of 
the indifference with which men regard women, it is 
one couse of delicacy, touchiness and hair-trigger 
condition of the American, of his inability to endure 
prolonged hard work, of his restlessness, shiftless¬ 
ness and inability of deeper thought. It is one 
cause of the shirking of the duties of maternity of 
the women, their fierce intolerance of the frail sister 
and the tendency to general persecution of those 
who are able to enjoy themselves. But the presence 
of such a pernicious poison does not whitewash the 
Scribe. If he cannot be accused of generating it he 
certainly is pre-eminently the individual spreading 
and innoculating it, and aggravating its ravages and 
in firmly establishing its hold he is the sole unrivalled 
administrator and knight of Mrs. Neurasthenia. 
All the moral literature in America is, after all, more 
or less only the voice of a wretched, abominable, in¬ 
visible, gnawing, tiny microbe, and not by any 
means caused by the judicial faculty of conscience or 
the voice of God. Herbert Spencer rightly assumes 
the existence of a realm external to us that has 
power to affect our sensibility. Had he lived in 
America he would perhaps have added to “exter¬ 
nal ” “ also internal of us,” to make it penetrable 
to the thick epidermis of the moral Scribe. 

“Oh!” cries he, “ yorf are after promiscuousness. 


5° 


A Moral Scribe. 


I tell you promiscuity will end in terrible profana¬ 
tion. Lewdness and licentiousness will destroy the 
sacredness of our homes and cause the fall of the 
greatest republic.” Exactly. The moral worm is 
gnawing on both the home and the republic with 
terrible effect right now. Home is already a farce. 
Rearing of the children not thought of. Parental 
crontrol not even preached. But family honor, 
moral purity or other inane cussedness prompted by 
diseased nerves and a surplus of bile, is uphteald 
with murder, suicide, the insane asylum and the 
penitentiary. 

Of the sins of the moral scribe there is no end. 
Take for instance the prize ring. Of all the needful 
things that the uncrowned yahoo of the biggest 
conntry on earth needs is a prize-fight. There is 
not a one-horse town west of the 78th degree longi¬ 
tude aud south of the 38th degree latitade that does 
not need annually a well conducted set-to with or 
without gloves to the finish or otherwise. And 
why ? Simply to show that there are men who can 
take a licking and that it is the height of 
manliness to be able to both give and take one. 
Not a day passes in which a gaunt and weak coun¬ 
try jay chuck full of poor diet, hardly ever whiskey, 
does not murder some body with a Winchester or a 
six-shooter simply because under a blazing hot sun 
and scribe and pharisee honor, he thinks it is the 
only way to settle a grievance. All the deadly 
feuds in America involving whole families have 
nothing else for their cause but the lack of knowedge 
of honorable defeat. If the moral scribe but knew 


A Moral Scribe. 51 

how it dampens the ardor of the pistol toater to see 
a tremendous power of hitting outside of cold lead, 
how small he who killed a man at the sight of one 
who voluntarily faces terrific blows without wincing, 
many a family might be spared their bread winners. 
Many a life—usually the most useful—might be 
saved. That the scribe hates the very sight of 
pugilism and pugilsts is not necessary to repeat. 
He will even say: “ Ah! you pugilistsresort to guns 
and clubs, too, in a drunken brawl.” In order not 
to leave a single thread of usefulness on the 
character of the prize-fighter. Governors of states 
will vie with each other to suppress him. The 
most outrageous laws are passed to prevent a glove 
exhibition. Is it any wonder that murders and 
slaughter of human beings in the south and west 
are more numerous than in the states of all Europe 
combined ? The profeshional prize-fighter may not 
be a great moral character, he may be a drunkard 
and everything else undesirable, he may use clubs 
and guns in drunken fights, and prize-fighting may 
not be refining, but the principle underlying pugil¬ 
ism, i. e., unflinchingly taking punishment 
without malice, is certainly wholesome, not to men¬ 
tion the incentive to exercise or the entertainment 
they give; not to mention the pluck they teach. 
But the scribe’s hatred of all flesh prompts him to 
persecute the “ slugger” like a mad spaniel would 
a muzzled bulldog. 


5 2 


That Nameless Product. 


THAT NAMELESS PRODUCT. 

The savionrs of society are the universal plague 
of the earth. But the proud United States sport an 
affliction erect on two legs and bearing all the out¬ 
ward semblance of the genus homo that is unknown 
elsewhere. All humanity primarily must be divided 
into two kinds. The happy and the growlers. But 
here is a species that is something worse than a 
growler. It is the puritan, so called. For barring 
religious crankiness he has no more semblance to 
the i uritaps landing in the “Mayflower” than 
strycl nine has to sweet milk. He eats, he drinks, 
he sleeps, he works, he prays, he fights, he marries 
and raises children, does all this much like a ma¬ 
chine, with strict propriety, much like thpse. But 
the different waves of emotion, love sympathy, joy¬ 
ful or painful flutterings of the heart that animated 
the former Puritan immigrants this modern article 
knows not. The courtship of Miles Stanish is not 
re enacted among them. An earthly paradise he 
knows not. Life’s sunshine he receives with a mut¬ 
tered curse. Exuberance of spirit he knows not. 
Jollity and cheerfulness in others he deplores. A 
frolic he assails. Recreation he denounces as sin. 
Conventional freedom he despises as corruption and 
abomination. His speech, his looks, his dress, his 
letters his prayers are patterns of an icy decorum." 
His nature is that of a reptile. Nay worse, he is 
a human reptile inimicable to his warmblooded fel¬ 
low creatures. Affecting them like the rattle- 


That Nameless Product. 


53 


snake affects the robin-redbreast, like the toad 
affects the clear water of the well. He is the 
human poison toad and kill joy, for like the cat 
will watch for a mouse this human tadpole will 
watch for the slightest ripple of laughter by the 
old and yonng and woe be unto them if the law can 
be invoked, or other toads aroused to condemn in 
mass'-meeting assembled, the “horrible breach of 
conventionality,” the “sin against society.” There 
is nothing sacred to this poison toad than a univer¬ 
sal grave yard. Let there be a few sheep browsing 
happily and contented on the green pastures of the 
universe and lo! here comes this execrable black 
wether and bawls out “corruption” an “sin” at the 
sight of green grass. Let the deer from afar search 
out the cooling spring and lofthis living abomi¬ 
nation pretends to be drinking there and already is 
soiling the cooling drink with stinking offal. This 
is the Puritan or poison toad or stinker or what¬ 
ever his real name in the respectable role, above the 
law or law making. His other role is the exact 
opposite. In the first, he poses as a thing above 
humanity. In the latter, he is in his true and nat¬ 
ural role—below a beast. For really, the so-called 
Puritan is a degenerate biped. Wether made thus 
through continence or incontinence, religion or 
disease, he is never natural. When Tolstoi after 
the nature of a scribe, threw his share of dirt at 
flesh and blood, by writing the Kreutzer Sonata, he 
must have accidently stumbled on such an individ¬ 
ual. For his hero, the wife-killer Posdnicheff, is a 
fair sample albeit of Russia. This individual after 


54 


That Nameless Product. 


nibbling awhile at the sweet and sour apples 
of matrimony, somehow beeame afflicted 
with matrimonial indigestion and disgust. 
And—here is where he shows the spirit of 
the puritan or poison toad—began to hate his wife 
because she did not get afflicted likewise ; and when 
she began to stay cheerful yet still faithful to him 
he stabs her to the heart—out o.f jealousy, as Tol¬ 
stoi has it. Of course jealousy here is only another 
word for intolerance. For the Conclusion which the 
kill-joy and poison toad universally reaches is ar¬ 
rived at in the Kreutzer Sonata, which is that matri¬ 
mony is no good—and that abstinence, yes, total 
abstinence from matrimonial joys is salvation. This 
exact attitude and line of reasoning the American 
puritan both in his respetable and criminal role will 
invariably follow. Ret the puritan get drunk—and 
goodness knows with wine, as all other good things 
he is like a child with a plate of soup, ever in a 
mess, the conclusion first is that alcohol is the 
sinner and the drunken puritan himself the injured 
saint. Further that alcohol to everybody else like¬ 
wise is ruin and only fit for total anihilation. Some¬ 
times this cold blooded reptile enjoys the hospitality 
of a lady. Fortwith the loud ha-ha across the street 
proclaims to other toads that there is no virtuous 
female on earth ; that women are only corruption 
and immorality, and the police better look out. Of 
course every country has a Posdnycheff, a yahoo. 
England has drunkenness for the national vice, 
France the absynthe-fiend, Germany, recently the 
schnaps-drinker, Russia likewise the votka slave, 


That Nameless Product. 


55 

China the opium habit, etc., all of which thrive on 
faulty intellects and degenerate nerves. 

But individuals whose only enjoyment is 
slavish denial, restriction and abstinence they have 
not got. The individual who dares not read a 
book lest he be ruined entirely, who is not to 
be trusted with the free joys of life lest he kill him¬ 
self, dwells not there. The puritan, the tadpole, the 
poison toad, the croker, the kill-joy or whatever the 
name of this nameless article has, further this 
characteristic; he does not want to learn. Perhaps 
fifty different books have been written to expose 
gambling and the snares laid for the weak-headed 
smart-alec, yet there are not nine out of ten victims 
of the gaming table that would thank you for 
making a present to them of one of those valuable 
books, no matter if every week their hard-earned 
wages are gambled away in one half hour. This is 
quite puritan of the non-respectable type. But the 
respectable article makes no exception. The 
plainest lesson of recreation, the most beneficial en¬ 
joyment it is impossible for anybody to demonstrate 
to him. Fun he is suspicious of; love he calls corrup¬ 
tion; enjoyment is sin; sport is crime; a bycicle in¬ 
decent; a laugh is blasphemy. On the other hand, 
absence of feeling is decorum; deadness of heart 
purity; devil worship religion; jealousy and intoler- 
ence morality; impotence is life and cussedness 
benevolence; being ruined is being saved. Whether 
now this nameless product, male or female, is the 
outcome of the scribe’s and pharisee’s pernicious 
anti-flesh and blood policy or whether an American 


5<5 


The Foolism Scribe . 


bacillus attacks his or her liver and warpes their 
understanding, we will here not argue, certain it is 
both scribe and pharisee are their faithful servants 
or protecting knights alternately. And it so 
happens that the literary white-caps, the white-caps 
on the bench, the white-caps in the pulpit, the 
white-caps in the legislature, the white-caps in the 
woods, the midnigh bold knobber, the holy white 
cross fiend, are increasing and multiplying like the 
plague. 

Or can it really be that nine-tenths of the daily 
calendar of transgressions from the throwing of 
rocks at passing trains to plain drunks, and down 
from slanderous tongue attacks to the assaults with 
club, knife and pistol, are only the results of un¬ 
relieved wretchedness. If so, arise some prophet 
and preach a gospel of amusement to the wretched 
and convert the surplus energy of their bodies into 
channels of acceptable pleasure, fun and mirth. 


THE FOOLISM SCRIBE. 

[This includes the advocate of every ism except humane utilitarianism.] 

He is a fiend of another sort than the pure and 
moral scribe. While the latter’s ideal of beauty as¬ 
pires to ‘ ‘weak men and weaker women, ’ ’ best known 
in modern ads., the former’s mission is chiefly to breed 
discontent. It does not matter if he is an individu¬ 
alist, an anarchist, socialist, communist, nationalist, 
single taxer, etc., his occupation plainly is only to 



The Foolism Scribe . 


57 


hide the truth, ignore science and in analyzing to 
see everything except the factor “Time,” whether 
it be history or part and parcel of an ethical principle. 
That right is only might and wrong only that that 
has not got steel, lead, poivder and dynamite to back 
it seems never to occur to him. Yet it is plain as 
day that the majority rules the minority o* ly be¬ 
cause it is justly supposed that the former can lick 
the eternal stuffing out of the latter and that where 
the minority bosses the majority only wl en the 
former is securely entrenched and the latter foolishly 
exposed or hatched in a helpless condition. Or is 
the court of last resort above all the superior courts 
of the earth not grape and canister? Does the vic¬ 
torious majority not ride rough-shod and without 
mercy over the minority. “Ah ! ” cries this scribe, 
“ we break down the armor of the brutal majority 
and secure thus a footing for the oppressed.” 

Not when he continues tv) hatch the majority in 
the same helpless and weak condition as he has done. 
Not when time-favored freeholders can pit them 
against each other in mortal combat to mutual op¬ 
pression or annihilation. Not when militia and 
Pinkertons are recruited from their ranks. 

“What is time-favored?” will you ask. It is 
this : The foolism scribe, no matter of what col or, 
declares the earth belongs to man equally allround. 
So it might if humanity, large and small, h ad come 
to earth in one stroke of lightning. But it did not. 
It came straggling, first one, then the other. Those 
stragglers still come. They are unlimited. Count¬ 
less earths would not be sufficient to accommodate 


5 * 


The Foolism Scribe. 


all if the earths could be had. But they are not. 
Our real estate is decidedly limited. Notwithstand¬ 
ing the boasts of the scribes that soon the Desert of 
Sahara will be made fertile and gardens in midair 
are practicable. When you know the supply is lim¬ 
ited and the demand unlimited will not after the law 
of the survival of the fittest has been enacted to the 
bone a premium on real estate be the result ? That 
premium is called tribute, rent. Who has a right 
to exact rent? The one that came first clearly, not 
the one that came last, and certainly not the one 
who came here through his titleless parents’ matri¬ 
monial transgressions. Adam, the first man, would 
have held title to the whole earth if he could have 
kept ready enough powder and lead to keep back the 
flood of stragglers. As it is the earth is owned by a 
few thousand such Adams—called landlords—to 
whom title has come by special fortified advantage 
of their fathers. The foundation of landlordism is 
the “I came first,” which is superior even to the 
‘ ‘ I am better, ’ ’ notwithstanding Scribe assertions to 
the contrary. The ‘ ‘ I came first ’ ’ family is favored 
by time—time-favoi ed. 

This principle cannot even be upset by revolution, 
for after the revolution the “ I came first ” will have 
to be enacted de novo (as for instance when steel bul¬ 
lets test the validity of a nation’s single tax titles). 
You can free the bondsman to a certain extent, you 
can elevate the laborer to the rank of an aristocrat, 
you can shorten the hours of labor, you can wrench 
concessions from the landlords and employers, but 
upset this principle—never. 


The Fool ism Scribe , 


59 


The earth without poverty and grinding to death 
can only support its certain amount of landlords, all 
others must exist for revenue only and lead a life of 
bondage or slavery in one form or other. Unearned 
increment is privileged leave founded on the “I 
was first. ” Communism, socialism, anarchism or 
all other fool isms might be successfully practicd by 
the landlords of the earth, but by their serfs and 
vassals as well and equally impossible. The man 
with the advantage, whether by time, inheritance, 
and too by health, strength or otherwise is ill 
controlled with rules, regulations and by-laws, 
in fact, ’cracy: aristorcacy, boodleocracy, pluto¬ 
cracy, autocracy, mobocracy, etc., cannot be abol¬ 
ished because allied too much too the law 
of the survival of the fittest. Quality will ever 
rule quantity in the animal kingdom and too 
in man wherever the factor time or other things 
not give an advantage. How foolish to say: “Every 
laborer is entitled to the full value of his produce’' 
when the laborer is only employed because, like 
raw material, to yield revenue, it turns out that he 
can be used. Who would use that raw material in 
which there is no profit, who would use that laborer 
or his products in which there is no revenue? 
The laborer is not a king but in 99 cases out of a 
hundred the meloncholy results of rabbit warren 
morality at a high pressure preached and practiced 
for the benefit of ’cracy or national wealth. The 
moral as well as the ism scribe, eternally parades 
before him the immense quantity of starch that is 
going to be raised to the acre when the population 


6o 


The Foolism Scribe. 


gets denser. The law of diminished returns never 
bothers him. Starch is all that is needed to feel 
happy and the fool ism $cribe with a long array of 
figures demonstrates annually how many billions 
more people the earth can sustain, and how Malthus 
was a natural born fool and the poor starch-fed 
laborer underfed and overworked, must believe him. 
Who would not like to be king ? Who would not 
like to be entitled to the earth ? Who would not 
want to rest on a golden throne, of a golden perhaps 
on earth and in heaven ? Surely the outcast surplus is 
not to be blamed, but the scribe who manufactures 
him, and the scribe who teaches him falsely, is. 

To teach anarchism may be a wholesome lesson 
to the hayseed lawmaker, but automata cannot ex¬ 
ercise a iree will on their own accord. What more 
is man than an automaton, impelled, compelled and 
propelled only by circumstances or situations ? Cir¬ 
cumstances may easier be obeyed than the lash of the 
police magistrate, I acknowledge, but the human 
automaton is erratic and will clash against its kind. 
This clashing is derrogatory to happiness. Herbert 
Spencer’s the-burnt-child-dreads-the-fire kind of pol¬ 
icy no doubt is correct, the best and safest for grown 
people. But there is no rule without exceptions. 
All law might be boiled down to meet these excep¬ 
tions. The Scribe and Pharisee is one of them. 
There are too many people in this world who can¬ 
not distinguish a Herbert Spencer from a Victor 
Hugo. Who will take the latter’s lying declaration: 
that he knows there is a God and that he knows he 
will exist after death for science and truth, and on 


The Foolism Sctibe. 


61 


the strength of that in the midnight hour blow a 
hole through their defenceless neighbor’s anatomy 
a fa white-cap for violating a Bible commandment. 
Anarchism unlimited and successful needs an ideal 
man, needs the ideal man of the Scribe and Pharisee, 
and he is in modern parlance a first-class “ sucker,” 
In plain English, an idiot. The idiot is not a suc¬ 
cess. Idiot-farming is not a success- The Scribes 
and Pharisees have tried it for over 2,000 years and 
never entirely succeeded. And it is about time that 
idiot moulding be abandoned as useless and dis¬ 
graceful and that entire liberty or anarchy only be 
preached according to the limit permitted by the 
laws of utility. This perhaps with all foolisms. 
The pleasantness of nationalism or paternalism is 
best studied perhaps by putting their champions un¬ 
der a life-long sentence of brass button tyranny and 
taking their honest dying declarations afterwards 
applying the “Do unto others as you, etc.,” prin¬ 
ciple vigorously. For while a thousand and one 
reasons demand that the common highways, rail¬ 
roads and telegraph lines should be under an impar¬ 
tial and strictly just control it is a plain fact that 
“the government,” especially “hay-seed govern¬ 
ment,” is a lamentable commercial and financial 
failure, not to mention its utter incapacity to recog¬ 
nize the rights of the minority. Besides what is 
postmaster censorship but the assertion that the na¬ 
tion is here for the mail service, not the mail ser¬ 
vice for the nation, as one would suppose. 
But the foolism scribe is only the right-hand bower 
ol the moral scribe. He cannot or will not see that 


62 The Foolism Scribe. 

the present white slavery is almost the same as the 
black slavery in the South. There the breeding of 
slaves was a profitable business. Slave-own¬ 
ers sold their own mulatto children often 
for a good v price outright. The difference 
is now that parents sell themselves and 
their children, not outright, but by the day, 
week or the month, and according to the laws of 
supply and demand; the latter means that all risks are 
borne by the seller and none by the buyer. Slave¬ 
breeding, the fruit of ignorance, is carried on in all 
lands—it pays. But while the moral scribe 
is the head breeder, applying the moral lash 
the ism scribe rubs pepper and salt into the 
wounds cut by the lash of “untoward circutn- 
staces ” and goads and irritates the moral scribe’s 
helpless victim^with bogus relief schemes, anti-pov- 
ert} r tactics, titles to fustian royalty, and particularly 
the right of the slave to whip his master. An im¬ 
mense amount of worry, agonizing discontent, de¬ 
moralizing, hopes and air-castles with frantic grasps 
for straws by the drowning is the result. 

Or will you tell me that the “ great cormorant” 
can get any more for his money than his victuals 
and clothes and the soft pressure of a woman’s 
swelling form ? It is true he smokes fine Havanna 
cigars and reclines in a splendid carriage, but does 
he get more enjoyment out of these than the tramp 
eating a scrap dinner under a hedge can get out of 
a chew of tobacco or the stolen ride in an empty 
freight car ? Do the victuals of the earth spoil in 
inaccessable storehouses ? What is the richest 


The Foohs?n Scribe. 


6 3 


countries—America’s—complaint but paucity and 
poverty in everything except wheat starch and 
hog-grease ? What does the Oklahoma rush and 
$5 an acre farm rent mean but scarcity of real es¬ 
tate ? The real estate sweater is not all to blame 
for high prices of land. 

It may be true that all the golden splendour of all 
the centuries is only the result of the merciless grind¬ 
ing up of bone and sinew, nerve and brain of scribe 
corralled slaves, and in ancient and modern monu¬ 
ments of industry grin hideously the skeletons of 
myriads of innocent children, whose only play was 
their superhuman and fatal struggle with a cruel 
bitter fate. But will you tell me that the riches of 
the “cormorant” divided up among them would 
have reached all around ? Or that the laborer 
practically can be paid in advance with his produce, 
his pay yet uncreated, yet unused, yet to be profit¬ 
ably marketed ? If he insists on instantaneous pay 
it can at best be a mere pittance. Time is a terrible 
factor. Every grain of wheat insists on six months 
of leisure before it honors the laborer’s time check. 
The lick the father strikes in the forest is only paid 
for after a life-time—to the son. If there is plenty 
any where outside of myriads of hungry months, I 
have failed to find it. Wrong distribution cannot 
be denied. But who is to blame when the number 
of mouths increases most where feeding ability exists 
least ? Surely not the cormorant. He may even be 
said to come to the rescue of the poor victim of 
moral folly in many ways. Then too, nature pro¬ 
duces her animals of prey. Nature, not perhaps the 


The Foolism Scribe. 


H 

scribe and pharisee, produces pitiless human sharks, 
tramps, shirks, loafers, weaklings, usurpers, money- 
grabbers, cut-throats, value inflaters, etc., who are 
a burden, who are next to the scribe and pharisee, 
the burden of humanity. And it may be correctly 
said that half of toiler’s toil is for the benefit of the 
shirk and that security costs half of a man’s life. 
But did not you know that as eternal vigilance is 
the price of liberty, eternal war on the parasite is 
the \ rice of happiness? 

And yet ism Scribes propose to build nests for old 
and new parasites, to raise them to equality, honor, 
office and high position. The cancers of the body 
politique are to be postered over with and fostered 
under the bandages of equal rights and equal privi¬ 
leges. And tolerance cannot be denied. Any so¬ 
ciety to prevent cruelty will ease the yoke in some 
direction. '1 he English language perhaps contains 
no better word than the word “humane.” Less 
hours and better wages are the good result of judi¬ 
cious labor agitation. But robbery (such as the 
property owner is accused of) invariably presupposes 
at least two individuals—ti e robber and the robbed. 
The latter in many ins'ances is absent. Possess'on 
no doubt sometimes legal robbery; but what is 
gained when in the midnight hour the torch is se¬ 
cretly applied to already created and sorely needed 
wealth or when useless war is waged against neces¬ 
sary—nay, vital—security? 

It may tickle the toiler’s ear when the great gong of 
tremendous coming cataclysm reverberates through 
the land, but barring a few isolated cases, ease, com- - 


The Pharisee. 


65 


fort, luxury, happiness and peace for the greatest 
possible number lie not by the route of indiscrimi¬ 
nate communism nationalism, paternalism,socialism, 
anarchism, Georgeism, despotism, transcendental¬ 
ism, or any criminal, suicidal ism. For the stern, 
gaunt and never-tiring specter of poverty will ever 
be hovering about the community that lulls in fan¬ 
ciful security and false hopes of plenty. The fear 
of poverty that you so fondly would abolish, and 
whose annihilation perhaps even the human poison- 
toad would welcome, alas ! lies not by the route of 
unilateral isms, but, odious as it sounds, rather by 
the route of stronger arms, clearer brains, calmer 
and better nerves. Prate not of aiding evolution, 
for degeneration certainly enters where pressure and 
employment ceases. 


THE PHARISEE. 

The difference between the Pharisee and the 
Scribe is that the latter only uses his pen, mostly 
for literary subtlety, elevating humbug, and self- 
glorification, while the former uses manner, speech, 
dress, conduct, and especially his jaw, to pro¬ 
claim to the world that he or she is emphatic¬ 
ally better, superior and more right-minded than 
their fellow mortals. The individual who inwardly 
thanks his wooden, stone, fleshly or invisible image 
that he is more respectable than others, is a Pharisee. 
The judge, who proclaims in his mechanical sen- 



66 


The Pharisee. 


tence according to law and not to justice, that he is 
not the poor culprit’s keeper, who deserves a little 
correcting advice, is a Phatisee. The periodical 
crop of saviours is a crop of Pharisees. Universi¬ 
ties and colleges, schools and churches swarm with 
them. 

The Indian’s medicine-man, the African’s voudoo 
doctor, the Pagan’s priest, the Christian’s spiritual 
adviser, in fact the charlatan or anybody that is not 
as good as common humanity but asserts superiority 
is a pharisee. The pharisee is the only thorough 
born liar in existence. Born intellectually dishon¬ 
est he will lie, to himself, to his neighbor and his 
God. His occupation is to successfully circumvent 
the truth. The only science he recognizes is the 
science of duping. A thorough-bred pharisee can 
no more distinguish the difference between truth and 
falsehood than a blind bat could darkness and day¬ 
light. Yet like the latter he does not bump his 
head much, either. 

The pharisee in life is invariably an eminent suc¬ 
cess. The top of the latter of the social and politi¬ 
cal frame work is filled by him. The religious 
world is composed ol him. The first prominent in 
dividual in history was he, the only individual of 
influence of the present, without sense, without 
reason, a born criminal, he is a leader, bold, sweep¬ 
ing and aggressive. Why? Because his mental 
make-up is concentrated into the 6th sense. The 
same sense that generates the bright hopes of re¬ 
covery of the hopelessly doomed consumptive, the 
sense that guides yet retains the savage in the track- 


The Pharisee , 


67 


less wilderness, the sense that brings the little 'calf 
home when strayed for miles from its mother, the 
sense otherwise called intuition, instinct, sentiment. 
The nerve force that attracts and repells without 
reason or logic. 

When according to Herbert Spencer’s researches 
in the early days of evolution, long before the 
bible was thought of, the human brain jelly incom¬ 
plete and unstable, was irritated by thunder claps 
and rumbling or hissing noises underground, and 
science or reason almost unknown, an individual 
with a softer head and more incomplete than the 
rest, would frown and warningly say: “Beware, the 
wrath is a coming, I know it,’’ the first pharisee had 
made his first appearance with his first two lies 
And when the people would ask who is a coming, 
he would say: “The evil one’’ or devil. Later 
more questions being asked, he would say: “The 
good one—God—He is mhd,” Telling two more 
lies. The softness and jelly-like condition of the 
human understanding could not then throw off 
these lies with the most powerful efforts. The 
melancholy consequence was they stuck like wax 
and grew on the helpless human craniums in the 
shape of bumps. Tor the sake of brevity we will 
call them here devil-scare-bumps, which in 
time hardened into devil-worship functions. These 
are found on almost every individual. The lower 
bred the individual the more prominent will be the 
faculties that were exercised when humanity was in 
its infancy. Fear of the mysterious and inexplicable, 
is the chief faculty yet of the brute creation. An 


68 


The Pharisee . 


unusual inexplicable noise will alarm the nerve 
centers of the deer profoundly, and whether there 
be danger or not, violent action in the deer will be 
the result. The draft mule makes a wide circle when 
passing a covered upffeed box, and if the pharisee 
mule was at hand to explain the demon there is 
concealed under the box, a most devout religious 
mule would be the result. Yes, the animal king¬ 
dom is full of religion or devil worship. Bach 
specie has got its own separate demon that it looks 
for to be scared at, to be haunted by; and it cannot 
be otherwise. Devil-scare bumps grew onto the 
the brain of the animal when it was forming, the 
worship of a devil in some form will therefore be 
characteristic of human and animal brains until a 
higher development takes place. That individual, 
however smart, whose devil-worhip bumps impair 
his mental vision is a pharisee. The pharisee, whether 
called a preacher, moralist, saint, saviour, man of 
moral principles or other innocent names is not a 
hypocrite but a bona fide natural animal individual 
though of a low order, whose devil-worship-bumps 
control him the same as the scare controls the run¬ 
away team—like it he cannot stop, no matter of go¬ 
ing headlong to perdition. Although a genuine liar,^ 
he is not a fraud if he is dangerous, to the common 
wellfare of the masses. The difference of the differ¬ 
ent ones is slight. The Christian pharisee makes 
no exception to his heathen brother. The latter 
brings his hard earned offerings to to his ugly grin¬ 
ning stone or wooden god in the same slavish spirit 
as the Christian pays his dollar to his image of a 


The Pharisee . 


6 9 


vicious demon-deity. Either God has the attribute 
of good and evil, both fit the particular bumps of 
their makers to a nicety. If the bumps change the 
devil-god changes. “Oh you infidels,” cries the 
pharisee. “You can tear down everything 
but you cannot build up anything,” In 
other words, the infidel can smash up the 
devil-god but he cannot destroy the bumps 
that manufactured them. And no doubt the indi¬ 
vidual who is blessed with a superabundance of 
devil-worship-bumps is in despair when he is de¬ 
prived of the exercise of them. And he is almost 
excusable when approaching the iconoclast with 
tears trickling down his cheeks, he begs him for ad¬ 
vice, how to now satisfactorily employ his well-de¬ 
veloped, well-trained hell-knobs. Cultured people 
employ them now-a-days by bellowing amen at the 
“ unknown ” or the “unknowable.” Some take 
to spiritual “ fakes,” some to moral devil-worship. 
Some pharisees with coarse bumps-like Gladstone, 
fear the common Christian bargaboo-devil image, as 
in vogue 2000 years ago, only the offers broi.ghtare 
in cash, not in sheep, calves, cows and sons. The 
coming pharisee leader no doubt will find some new 
useless article to make sacrifices to e. i. to keep the 
devil’s bump’s in growing trim. For just as it is a 
great pleasure to the modern individual who does 
not eat fish to job a steel hook into the gills of the 
fish of the brook, because his ancestors were perhaps 
fishermen and the rekindling of their avocation with¬ 
in his cranium thrills him with joy ; so the pharisee 
will kill infidel monotony by gently robbing our an- 


7 ° 


The Pharisee. 


cestral bumps of spook-sacrifices in still more monot¬ 
onous purposeless idolatry. If infidels ever want to 
succeed and gain in respectability let them insist on 
.sacrifices of some sort. But unfortunately people 
prefer the sacrifices to a golden calf before all oth¬ 
ers. Some higher mental structures relish cast iron 
moral sacrifices. Truth is not recognized when it 
does not suit the hardened and well-fixed bumps of 
sheol. The most patent facts that contradict reli¬ 
gion are met with a loud “ ya-ha-ha, the unknown! 
I know the unknown! You don’t.” And science, 
which really discovered the unknown, is set on by 
old and young, male and female, fool and fanatic, 
priest and professors as something evil. Notwith¬ 
standing that all the benefits of humanity are the 
work of science, and it so happens that preacher and 
political pharisees alike with the customary dignity 
of bogus authority, like birds of prey prowl only 
there where struggling humanity endeavors to wipe 
away a tear or tries to meet a frowning fate with a 
smile. Woe to him who should not be able to meet 
the great human joy-killing poison toad with -due 
deference. He would find himself quickly in the 
kangaroo court of the county jail, or covered pub¬ 
licly with the vilest calumny, or lashed to a 
tree at the mercy of rural or city white caps unless 
he gains the only haven of refuge from pharisee 
bloodhounds—the morgue. 

The human joy-killing poison toad is in 
actual existence. It does not matter whether she 
simply lays in wait to catch the daughters of Eve to 
fill the cloister, or whether she imposes hundred 


The Pharisee , 


7 1 


dollar fines for insults to its kind or adds to the bur¬ 
dens of humanity with law, or merely howls re¬ 
straint, her end in view is to kill-joy and to propa¬ 
gate kill-joys. Men only go to saloons to escape the 
toad invested desert lying outside of it. They go 
therein despair for nepenthe, which they fail to get, 
for the poison toad is even there, under the benches, 
and outside in the back yard. The church is not 
its only home. The decrepid and fetid remains of 
an ill-spent life do not furnish its only contingent. 
Maidens as fair as day, young men in the prime of 
life (college boys) poison joy as readily as the 
nastiest toad ever did shatter the clear mirror of a 
well with a fiend : sh “kerpunk.” The cry is heard 
everywhere for restraint. It is the pharisee poison 
toad croaking for restraint that fines the father for 
assault and battery for whipping his child. The 
only restraint justifiable under the sun he defeats— 
parental control. The disguise of the pharisee is 
the “good.” Whether versed in demon-lore or in 
joy-killing, the pharisee fox-like means for the best. 
He tells his victim that when a joyless life sends a 
toiler cramped, life hungry into an untimely grave 
and he says it is for the best when the scribe dances 
his customary shuffling—off jig on the corpse of a 
homeless, friendless outcast. And no doubt the wolf 
in sheep’s clothing works for his own best. But 
is this wolf’s the poison toads, the pharisee’s best, 
the universal good ? Or don’t you think that at the 
midnight hour legions of the silent majority will 
kick at their coffin lids only to demand from the 
scribes and pharisees the promised heaven, the 


. 72 


The Pharisee. 


promised hell ? Can’t you imagine as ages run to 
eternity that thousands of hollow eyes glare from 
under the sod in mute agonizing appeal not to spoil 
the children’s play, not to sour the days of bloom yet 
to appeal in vain, only to see countless lives sacri¬ 
ficed by inches and lowered into the eternal tomb to 
remain there lifeless forever? Or is it possible that 
a few of the dead can turn over on their side in ago¬ 
ny and between their shining teeth hurl curses at 
the scribes and pharisees as they too after a life of 
rapine are finally lowered down to meet them? To 
see only the extent of their lies of heaven, hell, re¬ 
ward and punishment. To find that the hereafter is 
night eternal and no more, no less. To learn that 
life on earth is a blaze of light the best view of which 
to get it pays before it fades. To learn that the 
science of deadening is sin and that their own pharisee 
science of life is the science of death from beginning 
to end, demoniacly practiced from childhood to old 
age until the goal—the grave is reached. Your 
love for immortality is not your proof of an eternal 
existence. The scribe’s transportable soul is a poor 
miserable fake. What the fire is to the match, the 
electric current to the cell, the music to the bow and 
String, the power to the engine, the virtue to the 
medicine, the motion to the matter that is the soul 
of the human body. The soul is material despite of 
your fondest hope to the contrary, When your an¬ 
atomy goes to pieces rest assured that your soul like 
the flickered candle-light is to you or anybody else 
no more. Other lights may be lit, other souls be 
generated but you yourself have been to be no more. 


The Pharisee. 


73 


There is only one part about you that under im¬ 
mense favorable conditions might stay immortal and 
that is a very, very minute unicellular germ that 
proved the neucleus of your existence. 

The unicellular organisms into which your body, 
after the last breath has escaped, under certain con¬ 
ditions, splits up are perhaps life, not death, whether 
called protozoa, fungi, etc., and it is quite possible 
that unicellular life is generated chemically on the 
earth constantly at an immense rate. It is highly 
probable that if all life both unicellular and multi¬ 
cellular were destroyed on earth totally and entirely 
that half an hour after this universal death again 
would be generated, countless unicellular germs, if 
oxygen or other conditions be favorable. It is per¬ 
haps quite true that unicellular life may be immor¬ 
tal, at least as long as the present conditions of the 
earth lasts but man is not a single but a unicel¬ 
lular aggregation from which lile-germs separate 
only by way of reproduction. All the other single 
cells that build and supported the grand structure 
man are liable to collapse, not only into their sepa¬ 
rate parts, but the separate parts again loose the 
phenomena of life, which is equivalent to death. 

The reproductive cell though the only living 
thing surviving man, does so only in an ever re¬ 
modelled or repaired condition and can only last 
one, two or three generations at the most. No 
wailing, no praying, no hoping, no plausible ex¬ 
cuses will bring genuine immortality to only the 
ten billionth part of the human anatomy or the 
Psyche that it (the body) animated. Both are 


74 


The Pharisee. 


dead, ye pharisees; deader than a makrel. The 
happy microbe that was once the dead Tom Jones’ 
millionth or billionth part is after all only a frag¬ 
ment of his carcass not his life-body. And after 
carefully studying all physical effects of hypnotism, 
the induction of electricity, the induction of thought, 
the transmission of pain from one person to another, 
the active condition of the nervous state called 
consciousness or ability to condition, hypersesthesia 
and clairovyance, the delusions of a free will, un¬ 
conscious cerebration, unconscious attention, shift¬ 
ing of the nerve energy of the brain in polydeia 
monoidia and aideia, nerve contagion, hypothesis 
of a universal fluid, ether or more rarifled then 
ether—vacuum after duly considering all there is only 
matter, nothing but matter, not the faintest possi¬ 
bility of spirit, of conscious immortality or a chance 
of a brutal tri-split devil-god. 

Of course this is nothing new. But what must 
we think of Pharisee Talmage, Pharisee Sam Jones, 
Pharisee Major Penn, and all their kindred ilk, 
who preach every denial possible under the sun and 
with fables of a golden perhaps unrolled before 
the open mouth of a gaping, credulous multitude, 
deftly manipulate the contribution plate. To 
obtain money under false pretenses is not their chief 
sin, thousands of the Philistines are just as bad, but 
the neglect, ruin and desolation of individual lives 
and communities which they are the cause of, is 
demoniac and the outcome of brains in which any¬ 
thing like moral faculty or sense of responsibility is 
absent. 


The Pharisee. 


75 


The individual strife, the separation of man and 
wife, the persecution of fellow mortals, their bogus 
divine system of robbery sinks into insignificance 
compared with the vandalism with which they tram¬ 
ple under foot the delicacies of life, the pearls of ex¬ 
istence, and lay waste the Garden of Eden, the 
heaven of mankind. It may not be so bad for a de¬ 
moniac-divine free-lance to hold np a congregation 
for the sake of pleasant humbug, but to kick them 
both fore and aft besides is more than Satan himselt 
would’'dare to do. 

“Ah, you want our honest ministers not to earn 
an honest living ! ” cries the golden calf disciple, as 
he pushes aside an unpaid bill. Honest living, in¬ 
deed ! Let the clergy, the itinerant gospel fakirs, 
the revivalists, the evangelists, the political phari¬ 
sees, the would-be saviors of society, renounce the 
ways of a beggar, a tramp, a hoodlum, a robber, a 
sneak and a liar and really earn an honest living. 

There is political science, social science, hygienes 
of every description, of the body, the mind, the 
pocket, each one impossible to explain in a volume 
as big as the Bible. The knowledge of the world, 
humanitarianism, utilitarianism, the science of su¬ 
perfluities and the science of necessities, the science 
of true and false misery, the science of the pleasures 
of life, the right of privacy, the advantage of con¬ 
centrated million dollars, the disadvantages of scat¬ 
tered ditto, the science of capital, the science and 
cure of drunkenness, the ratio of production and 
population, the success of rascality, the success of 
honesty, the history and lessons of white slavery, 


j6 What must we do to. be Saved ? 

the repulsiveness of different nationalities, the real 
excuses for lying, the benefit of lying, the horrors of 
refinement and namby-bamby-.tom, the art of life, 
the philosophy of death, the science of bunco-steer¬ 
ing, the science and data of justice, the imperative 
limits of a thousand virtues. Which all are an im¬ 
perative necessity to all mankind. That the preach¬ 
er will have to know more than a smattering of 
mythology or the vagaries of the unknown, that he 
will have to substitute truth for fraud and love for 
malice is evident. But when he is engaged in an 
honorable business he has a right to demand pay¬ 
ment for services rendered. Preaching as he does 
now of things he knows not, sowing seeds of discon¬ 
tent and fanning that low, meddlesome passion of 
persecution he is a criminal as vile and subtle as his 
predecessors who once ground human beings to death 
on the rack or the block. 


WHAT MUST WE DO TO BE SAVED, IF 
SAVING THERE MUST BE? 

1. Stay out of church. —Eor churches are really 
gilt-edged palaces of sin and outrage or devil-wor¬ 
ship. The bible is merely the word of scribe and 
pharisee, containing only a smattering of science. 

2. Believe only what science proves —.For 
the salvation of mankind can only lie by the route 
of strict truth, such as conceived by the most per¬ 
fect mental human organization. 



What must we do to be Saved ? 


7 7 


3. Get more healthy. —Because health is en¬ 
ergy and pleasure. It is not necessary to increase 
your weight or muscular strength, for either one of 
them may exist without health, Muscular strength 
besides does not pay as well as nervous or brain 
strength. Sense or brain is the superior again of 
either. Yet it is a melancholy fact that the great 
men of history were men of great nervous endurance 
rather the brain power. And with all the close re¬ 
lation there exists between brain and nerve ye.t an 
immense difference there is. While the brain seems 
to be a general storehouse for nervous matter, with 
a powerful intellect may, in fact generally does ex¬ 
ist, otherwise general nervous deficiency. Almost 
as if the energy of the human body could not be in 
two places at once. For instance a great musical 
genius may possess in his fingers and toes nervous 
power enough for ten men and yet be almost an 
idiot. Or a great (so called brainy) ex-senator may 
be a matchless orator and possess energy enough in 
his tongue and jaw for twenty men, yet not have as 
much sound sense as the humble digger in the 
ditch* For if you search his speeches or analyze his 
ideas you will find them inferior to a negro’s corn¬ 
field philosophy. Gladstone is a man of nervous 
rather than brain power of intuition rather than logic 
of mechanical perfection more than intellectual re¬ 
sources, of art more than science. For science 
is not his forte. Napoleon the great pos¬ 
sessed an enormous nervous system wherewith he 
magnetized all his generals and which enabled him 
to almost do without sleep. Yet he was neverthe- 


j8 What must we do to be Saved ? 

less not burdened with too much sense. Somebody 
else had to furnish the brains. Wellington is a 
singular case. Most mechanical experts owe their 
achievements to a sound and strong nervous system. 
Of course when a mechanic becomes an inventor he 
gives evidence of gray matter. Yet there are thous¬ 
ands inimitable mechanics who could not invent 
the hundredth part of the difficult work they are 
doing. Brains must do that for them. Nervous 
strength, abart from being the muscles main-stay and 
vigor, is of an immense advantage in the world. 
The most powerful athlete, if nervously deficient, is 
defeated by the undersized cuss of superior nervous 
endowment. The most scientific, true and precious 
labor of the rarest brains of the universe is likewise 
thrown overboard by some “talented,” i. e., ner¬ 
vously well developed fakir, who could not discover 
the plainest every-day truths by himself alone, so it 
happens that a hand-full of Brittishers can rule 
400,000,000 people of India, and a single American 
desperado can rule a whole western county merely 
by prompitude of nervous action with very little 
brain added. Nothing else. Muscularity is raiely 
necessary. Or do you suppose if the powerful 
Zulus or all Africa were instructed in all modern ap¬ 
pliances of war and furnished with them they would 
be on a bar with Europe. Not at all. Eepel rifles 
and Krupp guns directed by their hands against a 
European e* emy in actual war would be worse than 
playing with strokes of lightning. If their bn ins 
did not get paralyzied, their shooting accuracy, 
i. e., nerve power, would be impaired by 


What must we do to be Saved f 


79 


the enemy’s terrific precision. The European 
rules the earth, not with muscle, but with his nerves 
and a little brain. China’s millions never will 
be a menace to the white race unless she proves 
nervous superiority. The latter may be recognized 
under the various names of art, talent, clever¬ 
ness, genius, capability, ability, intuition, vitality, 
and differs from brain power proper as practice dif¬ 
fers from theory. The man inventing a machine is 
the man of brains and theory, the man better able to 
run it of practice or nerve capacity. Brain-power 
represents mental conception, stock in trade and seat 
of production, nerve power the means of transporta¬ 
tion, selection and application thereof. One is mer¬ 
chandise, the other rolling stock. Of course, after 
all, paradoxical as it may appear, nerve and brain 
action are only touching for and attracted by the 
truth. The fingers rejoice at the solid hold, the 
brain is proud of the solid fact. The wing of the bird 
without its brain will tend from the seat of danger. 
The brain without nerves knows the good, the nerve 
without the brain is not comfortable with the bad. 
Brain or gray matter results in science, logic, con¬ 
sciousness and reason, and would be superior to all 
nervous advantage but for its scarcity. An editor 
with hardly sense enough to go in out of the rain 
may have a command of language and with it alone 
write powerful editorial nothings or make stirring 
nonsensical speeches and with these move the sur- 
lace of the United States, while a Spencer, Mills, 
Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin or Humboldt would not 
be as much thought of as a ward politician. Influ- 


8o What must we do to be Saved f 

ence is the secret of nervous strength, even if sense 
is the superior of the latter. The Alliance Mc- 
Cunes, J. J. Ingalls’, Gladstones, Rt. Reverend 
Bishops, Cardinals, Popular Orators and Evangelists 
are professional influencers, honored only for the in¬ 
ductive influence of the nerves, beneficial or per¬ 
nicious, that they wrought. In gumption, logic 
and science these would be miserable failures. 

If nervous strength is the foundation of success in 
life, it is necessary to know what is nervous weak¬ 
ness. This among a thousand others is awkward¬ 
ness, .shiftlessness, nervousness and the general hair 
trigger condition of the nervous system and absence 
of will-power. What is that foolish word spoken in 
company that proved your ruin? Not the lack of 
sense, for you know better, but the weak nerve that 
was not strong enough to control your tongue. 
Why is it that you cannot write as nice a hand as 
your neighbor next door? Because the nerve that 
guides the pen has not the power. The nice curves 
of the letter may be in your head, but cannot be 
transferred to your hand. Why do the words of 
your adversary fall in silvery sonorousness on the 
ears of the audience and yours gurgle like the water 
coming out of a bottle ? Because there is a super¬ 
abundance of nervous force in or about his voice 
and utterance that you have not got. Why does 
somebody else laugh at misfortune while you are 
prostrated and others feel comfortable where you 
feel wretched ? Because your nerves are not trained 
and hardened and are undeveloped and in poor con¬ 
dition. You may be born thus. But nervous defi- 


What must we do to be Saved ? Si 

ciency through inactivity or enormous expenditure 
is mostly acquired through mismanagement. Yet af¬ 
ter all a proper mode of life will cover a multitude of 
inherited and scribe and pharisee acquired sins and 
nerves as well as muscle can be strengthened by ex¬ 
ercise. This holds good particularly of the reflex 
and so called “functional” duties ol the nerves. 
Sleep can be gotten back by practicing sleep, appe¬ 
tite by coaxing it and cleansing of the system by 
permitting it. Providing, of course, if there is blood 
enough to practice with. If the amount of blood of 
your body is insufficient it is foolish to exercise 
thusly, because failure, ray functional nervous dis¬ 
eases would be the result. The brain is the reservoir 
of some, yet unexplored, energy for the breathing 
apparatus, heart, stomach, liver, etc., especially the 
kidneys. It is only when the cranial energy is used 
conclusively for other things than it was fitted for 
that the functional part of the nerves flags. 

The brain plainly was not intended at first to 
monkey with the unknown, or hanker after inspira¬ 
tion, or understand the Bible, or find out what a soul 
is made of. Its business primarily and perhaps ex¬ 
clusively is to furnish vitality to the various parts of 
the human body. It is no wonder at all that real 
brain-workers go down in health and that those who 
merely exercise their nervous system wax strong, 
that Darwin, Spencer and other real brain-workers 
are invalids and that the ward politician, who does 
perhaps three times their amount of work daily but 
merely repeats, is healthy. It is that searching, 
questioning, testing brain labor that hurts, not the 


82 


What must we do to be Saved f 


superficial repeating of known things learned by 
rote. High pressure lucidity without excitement is 
needed to see the truth. High pressure lucidity is 
founded on blood consumption. Supply of blood 
is founded primarily on food—the much despised 
square meal. Secondarily on “fresh” air, i. e., 
breathing. For breathing you need a certain amount 
of excitement. Most real ‘ ‘ thinking ” is a breath¬ 
less employment with merely cerebral excitation. 
Breathlessness is equivalent to death. What is the 
sigh but a rebelling of the lungs for want of air ? 

Let those then who worry and think cultivate lots 
of pleasant excitement, breathe by will power deep 
and often and eat the most nourishing, concentrated 
natural (not chemical) food. Gymnastics for the 
young is preeminently a lung-strengthener, lung- 
expander, a lung foundation. Sense, after all, is 
only a large, rich oxygen-freighted blood volume 
vigorously propelled through the brain. Muscular 
strength the same circulated in the muscles, and no 
doubt a healthy blood volume is necessary for nerve 
power and nerve expenditure. All the different[kinds 
of strengths of the various parts of the body are in¬ 
creased by practice, Practice after all is only strength 
giving when an increase of blood volume in the 
special parts exercised results. This is especially plain 
with brain and muscular practice, not quite so with 
nerve exercise. No doubt nervous weakness is 
readily overcome by “practice” too, but success is 
not achieved always with great alacrity, in fact, 
failure is about as common and complete as can be. 
The reason for this must often be sought in the 


What must we do to be Saved f S3 

physiological fact that the blood volume on account 
of heat and muscular exercise tends preponderingly 
to the surface of the body, and as nerve trunks lie 
deeper in the body and the human anatomy 
receives externally through a warm climate, stoves, 
heaters or clothing a constant heat, which no doubt 
starves the nerves of the blood volume that “prac¬ 
tice” would seek to draw to them. This explains 
at once why well nourished races of the temperate 
climate are nervously superior to those of a hotter 
atmosphere, why constant heat debilitates and why 
cold baths judiciously administered, invigorate. It 
follows then whoever is desirous of increasing his 
nerve strength he must mechanically, once or twice 
a week at least, compel the volume of blood to 
retreat from the surface to the interior to nourish, 
replenish and build np the stinted nerve fiber 
mere will power alone, cannot accomplish that. 
Exercise alone is not enough. Cold, as cold 
air and water is the most efficient if the 
warmth of the body can be made to return. 
Atmospheric pressure heavier than the sea 
level would give, might perhaps in a pleasanter 
manner drive the blood into a concentrated shape to 
the nerve-chords and limb centers, but not every¬ 
body is able to condense air or climb often 
enough into the bowels of the earth. Since cold 
externally applied causes blood to recede to the in¬ 
terior, warmth or heat will cause it to advance. 
Heat therefore applied likewise internally will 
also draw the blood to the interior, provided the 
difference of temperature between inside and outside 


84. What must we do to be Saved f 

is as great as the cold bath would give. Hot water 
drank on an empty stomach will concentrate extern¬ 
ally and near the nerve trunks almost as much 
blood as the cold bath would. Therefore in nervous 
training or nervous strengthening hot, (not warm) 
water drinking is beneficial. Ice water drinking 
since it chases the blood to parts where generally it 
is not needed, is injurious. No blood or a little 
blood in the stomach means there weakness, unease 
and disease. In using cold for nerve strengthening let 
the grown up child beware of constant cold, exces¬ 
sive cold or cold at the wrong time. All trainers fpr 
nerve strength should also bear in mind that the 
blood volume cannot well be utilized for head, 
muscles, nerves, stomach or bowels at once and 
at the same time. By strengthening one you must 
rob the other. You cannot rob all at once. The 
excessive thinker .besides robs the whole body. The 
strengthening of the minor trunks by blood support 
on the other hand, rather supports it. 

To increase one’s heart action there is no better 
drug than joy, jovility and pleasant excitement. 
Therefore have lots of fun. But remember noisines, 
boisterousness, rackets, rows and yelling is only the 
fun of an idiot. 

Sleep plenty and sound. Your neighbors dog, or 
piano, or laughter should not desturb you, but if it 
does take firm steps to have it stopped on the law of 
self-preservation. Bat plenty, drink wine and beer, 
or hire some body to learn you, drink it without 
making an ass of yourself. 

Remove all clouds and nightmares from the peace 


What must we do to be Saved f 85 

of your mind and others and be not always catching 
the next train. 

4. L,et your gospel be happiness to yourself and 
fellow men. Fight only the common enemy, such 
as the scribe, the pharisee, the saviours of mankind 
and the human joy-killing poison toad, male and 
female and remember honesty is the best policy. If 
you must lie do not lie to yourself. 

5. Remember that sere and yellow old age made 
the rules and regulations for mankind and that the 
sources of most morality, written and unwritten 
law are revenge, grudge, ignorance and biliousness. 

6. As nothing is gained by indolence, not even 
health, induce all women to do work of some useful 
kind, but bear ever in mind that a woman doing 
real brain labor or worrying mnst necessarily use up 
part of the fountain head of her energy and bearing 
healthy children can hardly be possible. Poor 
women should breed less than richer ones if at all, 
for economic reasons. To breed for revenue, for 
sweating, for scum, for misery, for failure in life, 
for agony or premature death is a worse sin than 
murder, more hellish than abortion, more fiendish 
than devil-worship and joy-killing. 

7. Do not sling mud at the frail sisterhood, But 
bear in mind that as population gets denser their re¬ 
spectability increases. Their only offence after all 
is shirking toil. But most of them could not get 
work, no matter how willing to toil. Most are fe¬ 
male loafers by compulsion, but nevertheless bear 
a heavy yoke. They are besides one mighty factor 
to prevent humanity from becoming much cheaper 


86 


What must we do to be Saved f 


and nastier than the scribe and pharisee seek to 
make it. 

8 Support the institution called matrimony when¬ 
ever it results in happiness to the contracting par¬ 
ties and gives the children a “raising.” Bear in 
mind when it fails to do this it is an abomination 
and not by any means holy. 

9. Know that this world owes nobody a living, 
that life is the struggle of a twolegged mistake, that 
a little usefulness and death only can correct. 

10. Flowers and women make men honorable. 
But there is too much female propriety, respectable 
cussedness and antipathy to men and gentlemen on 
the part of the women. Oppose this in a pleasant, 
courteous, but unrelenting manner. But remember 
the knight of a lady is also a knight defraying expen¬ 
ses. Every man by nature is at last the knight of 
one lady. By the term lady no highperched, use¬ 
less, unsympathetic, posing and exacting female is 
meant. 

11. The men that think themselves entitled to a 
virgin should be able to pay the terribie price that it 
costs. Whichever individual insists on a woman 
staying a virgin until death relieves her agony com¬ 
mits an unpardonable sin. Sexual affinity is the 
only true foundation of matrimony. Virginity may 
be instrumental in producing a healthy “firstborn” 
but 50 per cent, of the virtue of the former is wor¬ 
ried away in struggles, tears and troubles of the virt¬ 
uous. The most superb babe may shrivel for the 
lack of food and pernicious scribe and pharisee rais- 


What must we do to be Saved f 87 

ing. The virginal plum after all is a barbaric 
plum. 

12. Honor the living more than the dead. Do not 
try to save funeral expenses but face the inevitable. 
Any lawyer or public orator can deliver your funer¬ 
al oration. You need not a preacher to prepare an 
“ awful warning ” for the contribution plate. Re¬ 
duce all funeral expenses and funeral pomp. 

13. If you have lived up to the truth such as the 
most perfect human minds have discovered you no 
doubt will go to heaven, if there is one. 

As no government (anarchy) on account of the ever 
present pharisee in the land would not be good for 
the majority of the people and as honest men even 
are not qualified to rule others the following sins 
might be made punishable by law: (Law latin for 
the sake of brevity is left out here.) 

1. To punish any law-maker, legislator, aider- 
man, etc., with at least ten years in the penitentiary, 
who has committed the heinous offense of multi¬ 
plying,* or of making, or assisting in passing any 
unnecessary law against his fellow men, which 
without becoming absolete had to be repealed, as 
unjust, worthless, tyrannical, detrimental, or which 
must be considered a dead letter. For law-making 
is crime-making both direct and indirect, 

2. If law-making is right to punish first and 
formost any newspaper editor or proprietor, or 
author of a book, or preacher, or lecturer, with 
twenty years in the penitentiary, who intentionally 
or inadvertently proclaims any thing as fact or truth 
that exact science up to date considers falsehood. A 


88 What must we do to be Saved ? 

partial telling of the truth by the above or a statement 
with the light thrown on it from only one side shall 
amount to the same, i. e., falsehood. The preacher 
who sells lots in the golden perhaps and collects 
money for the same shall be especially liable. 

2. If gambling is a crime to punish also that 
real estate or property owner with five years in 
the penitentiary who with glowing advertisements 
or other devices allures the unsophisticated and robs 
them wholesale or on the installment plan or with 
high rent, by increasing rent or inflating values ar¬ 
tificially, and drowns the wails of his victim by hiring 
a brass band, a council or legislature or plies devices 
to boom the real estate gambling fnstitutions. 

3. To punish any judge, justice of the peace, po¬ 
lice justice or mayor with ten years in the peniten¬ 
tiary who admits or rejects evidence or questions 
and answers only according to the legal red tape in 
vogue and contrary to justice or humane utilitarian¬ 
ism, or who charges a jury in a one-sided manner 
calculated to obscure pertinent points. Fof what¬ 
ever is legal need not be right, and law is not always 
justice. The more so since lawful right is more or 
less only lawful might. The defeated minority may 
not be entitled to any right, but the majority should 
not be permitted to strike or kick anybody when he 
is down. 

5. If suicide is punishable to punish also as a 
misdemeanor, anybody who contracts wilfully or 
through negligence, any disease, such as smallpox, 
ague, typhoid fevers, cholics, colds, boils, con¬ 
sumption, etc., etc., which being preventable more 


What must we do to be Saved f 8g 

or less would teach speedily lessons of hygiene 

6. To punish any married man with five years in 
jail who flaunts into the face of a rejected and broken- 
up single man the marriage license as a divine pow¬ 
er to run the earth for himself and his married 
kind. 

7. To punish any married women with five years 
imprisonment who through spite, malice or grudge 
uses tongue, nails, sticks, claws or a sixshooter on 
either single men or women and asserts that matri¬ 
monial licentiousness gives her special rights to 
make war. 

9. To permit a charter to be issued to circles of 
married men and their families for the purpose of 
exchanging wives and husbands, furniture, opinions 
or children, for a longer or shorter periods and ac¬ 
cording to strict selectness and propriety among 
them, but to punish any man or woman of such cir¬ 
cle with death who shall go howling about the 
streets or dwellings saying that his or her family 
honor being ruined or his or her marital rights had 
been violated, especially after his or her particular 
clique should happen to split up. 

10, Since the State seems to find it impractical to 
replace stolen goods, embezzled funds or damage 
done by criminals to at least employ convicts for the 
common good of the “better” people, and not 
against them. To make a penitentiary self-sup¬ 
porting plainly is not enough. 


90 


Newspapers, Periodicals , Etc . 


SAMPE LINE OF SCRIBE AND PHARISEE 
VILEANY. 

Below are collected for better elucidation sins of 
the literary and as near as possible, of the “good” 
non-literary. Nature of the mischief caused by 
their suppositions and assertions and where in¬ 
volved, mischief and disease is found below each item. 
Sins of ommission are not mentioned. Political 
sins and personal squabbles—their name is legion— 
are left out because founded more or less only on 
the kind of criminality given below. Of course 
these are only the few rotten grains in the wheat 
and chaff that are uppermost and within reach. 
Transgressions against the true, the beautiful and the 
good the reader can find plentiful anywhere and the 
more examination progresses the plainer the mis¬ 
chief will be apparent. Each territory too differs in 
kind- The reader is invited to judge for himself. 

NEWSPAPERS, PERIODICALS, ETC. 

In Judge , March 8, 1890: “Our too feeble science.” 

Judge's Crime —Slur at science. 

Causes Mischief such as distrust of science by the 
people, slow advance of science and truth. Church ag¬ 
gression. Sometimes large money donations given to 
the church in place of for the benefit of mankind. 
Proper remedies in dangerous diseases not applied 
because science “ too feeble.” 

In the Standard, New York, a single tax paper: 

“1. The single taxis formed on the ethical principle that 
all men are equally entitled to what God ereated. 


Newspapers , Periodicals , Etc. gi 

“2. Bach man” (whether loafer, surplus outcast or crim¬ 
inal,) “is entitled to all his labor creates.” 

Crime: Mischievous falsehood. For, 1st. No man- 
discovered or man-invented deity ever created any 
thing that could possibly belong to “all” men. It 
is not a principle. It is not an ethical principle. 

2. Since the earth belongs to the living and not 
the dead, some of the unborn must pay “increment” 
or permission to live. As the earth is limited, the 
right to maternity and employment, etc., is lim* 
ited. 

Mischief: Discontent, useless worry, discords, 
strikes, labor riots, pinkerton murders, over popu¬ 
lation, poverty, squalor, hunger, starvation. 

Disease: Complaints peculiar to the poor and in¬ 
cident to over-crowding, worry or discontent. 

Once a Week , September 8, 1891: “ Un-American ten¬ 

dencies. . . . Do newspaper editors disregard the truth, 
as a rule ; are they even largely addicted to this habit ? 

. . . The United States will continue to grow great, glo¬ 
rious wealthy, because we are free.” 

Crime: Aiding and abetting pernicious patriot¬ 
ism and falsehood. 

The goddess of liberty “may not be drunk with 
success” but she certainly is “drifting along in the 
appaling gravitation towards the government by 
boodle in the hands of the unscrupulous minori¬ 
ties,” The days of freedom, too, are long past. 

Eugene M. Camp in Century , July, 1891 : “Mere wrong 
because tt is wrong is never retailed,” (by newspapers). 

Crime: Falsehood, The newspapers are not great 
moral institutions, if they do good some times. 


92 Newspapers, Periodicals, Etc . 

Eugene M. Camp in Century, July, 1891: “What obli¬ 
gation rests upon the dealer in news (newspaper editor) 
that does not likewise rest upon the dealer in flour, in meat, 
etc.” 

Every obligation as an educator. 

In New York Ledger , June 13, 1891: “A senseless war¬ 
fare—that against the church. The history of science is 
in fact a history of exploded theories.” 

Crime: A stab at science. 

Mischief: Blind belief, sumptuary laws, money 
spent to worship the devil, oppression, unhappiness, 
neglect of life. 

In Detroit Free Press, August 6, 1891 : “I am a poor 
young woman who seems to have no attraction for the op¬ 
posite sex, although possessed of unusual beauty and great 
talent. What advice do you give me ? Caroline. 

Answer : Trust in Providence, Caroline, and keep your 
powder dry. 

There never was a goose so gray, 

But some day soon or late, 

An honest gander came that way, 

And choose her for his mate. 

If you could add a fine large bank acconnt to your ex¬ 
istent attractions it might create a boom.” 

Crime: Mischievous advice. 

Mischief: Ruining the best part of her life or lur¬ 
ing her on to spinsterhood. Powder will not keep 
dry. A bank account ? 

Diseases: Nostalgia, impotence, merasmus, in¬ 
sanity, (mania). 

New York World, August 9, 1891: “The trend of philos¬ 
ophy is too large for the human mind to lift . . . From 
the beginning the philosopher has started out by trying to 
know unknowable things.” 


93 


Newspapers, Periodicals, Etc. 

Crime: A malicious slur at science. 

Mischief: Hiding the truth and favoring igno¬ 
rance. 

Baltimore Sun , June, 1891 ; “ Food supply and popula¬ 

tion. Mr. Ravenstein’s statistics do not concern us of the 
present generation very vitally. We can leave the solution 
to our great-grandchildren. If any race must go to the wall 
it may be confidently predicted it will not be the white 
race.” 

Crime: Neglect of duty, aiding and abetting sins 
against the unborn, a slap in the face of the western 
farmer with a mortgage. 

Mischief: Increase* of pauperism, suffering, sui¬ 
cide. 

Diseases: Most complaints of the poor and crowd¬ 
ed. 

Public Opinion , June 20, 1891: “To be an atheist now 
is to be an owl blinking in the broad sunlight of knowledge. 
.True science cannot be pressed into the service of atheism. 
This work (Prof. Buchner’s Force and Matter) is only one 
more unsuccessful effort to establish “ The Gospel of 
Dirt.” 

Crime: Mischievous falsehood and malicious 
slurs at science, aiding and abetting priestcraft. 

Mischief: Devil-worship, arrested progress, neg¬ 
lect of life, sumptuary laws. 

New Orleans Morning Star and Catholic Messenger, Au¬ 
gust 1891 : “One of the most widely accepted of those 
pieces of nonsenses is the dictum that human anergy is af¬ 
fected by climate . . . Human energy has reached its full¬ 
est development in every kind of climate and every latitude 
except the frigid zone. The equatorial regions furnish us 
with the history of Carthage and Egypt, the heated lati¬ 
tudes with Tyre and Sidon, Troy and Babylon, etc.” 


jyp Newspapers , Periodicals, Etc. 

Crime: Sophistry. 

Mischief: Wrong rules of life. 

Diseases: Neurasthenia and climatic complaints. 

New Youk World , quoted in August, 1891: “A com¬ 
bination between marriage and concubinage has its draw¬ 
backs.” Common law marriage apparently only identical 
with concubinage. “Individual liberty is a sacred posses¬ 
sion, but individual licence is quite a different thing. . . 
Marriage liberty seems to be rapidly degenerating into 
licence. ” 

Crime: Malicious sophisty. Since liberty is the 
prerogative of the free and licence only, an allow¬ 
ance given to the vassal or slave, but liberty never¬ 
theless, confusing or destroying ideas of true liberty. 

Mischief: Blue laws; death to happines, cele- 

bacy; wasted lives; slavery; insults with the Chris¬ 
tian epithet bastard. 

Diseases: Nostaligia, abortion and syphilis. 

Rev. Wm. Barry in Catholic World of August, 1891: 
“The physical basis of immortality . . is purpose and 
design. What I affirm in these words is not rhetoric, not 
sentiment, but proved and certain science, ” 

Crime: Mischievous falsehood. It it is not only 
not proved and certain, but no science at all. A 
succession of sequences without beginning or end, 
does not prove design or purpose. 

Mischief: False notions of life; distrust oi the 
truth; devil worship; decline of “good” charity and 
forbearance. 

The Iconoclast , Texas, August 8, 1891 : “ Man and his 

maker . . . Your evolutionist . . . cannot go to the be¬ 
ginning of anything, nor on to the end. Thus far science 


Newspapers , Periodicals , Etc. 95 

and philosophers have only succeeded in showing us what 
is false not demonstrating what is true. ” 

Crime: Dangerous sophistry. For as there is 
no first cause, because the first cause must also be an 
effect, so there cannot be an end, or last cause and 
the evolutionists has been both to beginning and end 
and proved long ago that cause and effect are 
eternal with no show whatever for beginning or end. 
Showing what is false besides must leave some 
truth. 

Other Crimes: Aiding and abetting false 

teaching, god in the constitution war. 

The Iconoclast for August, 1891: “Fvery human soul is 
a spark of divinity. ’ ’ 

Crivie: 1. Tickling the perching instinct in the 
wrong quarter. 

2. Establishing bugaboos or devil-deities. 

Mischief: False aircastles of immortality, neglect 
of life, persecutions and low, selfish passions 

F. M. Reid in Century , August 20, 1891: See this little 
acorn? In it is hid the power able to create, with the aid 
of outside influences, a hundred-branched oak tree, whose 
-every leaf will be a marvel of workmanship that no hu¬ 
man skill can imitate. 

Crime: Wretched sophistry and mischievous 
word-juggling. For if no human skill can imitate 
an oak leaf that does not prove that a devil-deity 
can. 

Mischief: False philosophy, God-ideas, God in 
the constitution worry, sumptuory laws. 

Cincinnati Enquirer, August 26, 1891: . . . The people 
of Ohio enacted a law that no license to marry should be 


g6 Newspapers , Periodicals , Etc. 

granted where the female is under the legal age of ma¬ 
jority. . . . 

Similarly and for the same purposes, the commonwealth 
of Kentucky passed a like law . . . and enforced it. 

But note what happens ! Some worthless whelp picks 
up an innocent or ignorant child, runs across the river 
. . . and gets married. . . . 

Is there no remedy. . . . ? 

Crime: Aiding and abetting pernicious hay-seed 
law-making and trying to defraud young women of 
more or less liberty. 

Mischief: Loss of chances to marry, spinsterhood, 
loss of happiness, weak men. 

Disease: Impotence, marasmus, nostalgia, new- 
rasthenia. 

New York Herald, August 17, 1891: Prints Sam Jones’ 
hot shot discourse at Prohibition Park against saloons, 
dancing, foreigners, Sunday fishing, recreation, etc. 

Crime: Aiding and abetting moral gospel-hunki- 
dunks, aiding false education. 

Mischief : Worry, denials, white capism, white 
crossism. 

Disease: Marasmus, religious mania, idiocy, nos¬ 
talgia. 

Detroit Press, August 27,1891 ; *‘The Bible . . . is a book 
that solves our deepest problems.” 

Crime: A dangerous falsehood. The Bible does 
not insure immortality any more than any other 
production of the Scribes and Pharisees. It does 
not solve a single one of the burning questions of 
the day as poverty, misery, starvation, disease and 
death. As a pleasant humbug it is poor and inef¬ 
ficient. 



Newspapers , Periodicals , AYr. gj 

Mischief: Fostering all the evils that human flesh 
is heir to. 

Diseases: All of man’s diseases under the sun. 
All the plagues of the earth. 

New York Ledger , August 29, 1891: “Every circum¬ 
stance contributes to render early rising advisable ...” 

Crime: Dangerous advice and mi schievous false¬ 
hood. 

Mischief: Loss of needed rest, restlessness, de¬ 
stroying the only opportunity left for sleep after 
midnight. 

Diseases: Insomnia, (psychic, toxic and senile) 
misery in after years and premature decline, prema¬ 
ture death. 

Kansas City S. Sun , October 18, 1891: “ . . . Wants to 
know where the tall lady goes every evening at 3 
o’clock ? ” 

Mike Kelley’s awful dive, the cover jerked off the Jef¬ 
ferson honk-a-tonk, where white society bucks meet and 
pass the time with colored damsels. The light turned on. 
A lot of skunks skinned.” 

Crime: Stinking explained page 32 and mischivous 
lying. It is not even telling disagreeable truths. 
Hanging out dirty linen and soiling clean under¬ 
wear in the editorial sanctum and scattering punk 
is not truth. The town-yap and country jay is no¬ 
authority on moral truths or moral fakes. 

In connection with the general foul tenor of the 
Sun, causing 

Mischief: Such as secret vice on one side, poverty, 
matrimonial squalor and increase of proletariat on 
the other; also quarrels, fights, murders, lawsuits, 


g8 Newspapers , Periodicals, Etc. 

divorces, endless worry, blasted lives, suicide, white- 
cap outrages, white-cross outrages, outrages of every 
description, but mostly lost manhood, lost woman¬ 
hood, blue laws. 

Diseases : Abortion, marasmus, nostalgia, neuras¬ 
thenia, insanity, kidney troubles, syphilis, (the lat¬ 
ter by the purity route.) 

St. Louis Republic , August 30, 1891 : Thunder, natural 
and artificial . . . there is a vast amount of bad guessing 
in the very best science there is at present. 

Crime : A slur at the best science, causing mis¬ 

chief as: general distrust of the truth, disastrous ex¬ 
periments, arrest of genuine improvements. Neg¬ 
lect of hygiene. 

Atlanta Constitution , end of August, 1891: ,Era of gen¬ 
uine reform . . . look out for a great religious revival 
. . . something of the old Puritan spirit . . . will come 
back. 

Crime : Inciting to, encouraging, aiding and 
abetting Puritan persecutions. 

Mischief'. Devil-worship, or golden calf contri¬ 
butions, degeneracy into medaeval barbarity. 

New York Herald, August 8, 1891: ‘‘France has lived 
through two decades of aggressive irreligion, and now 
there has come another swing of the pendulum . . . 
Young France ... is reacting, slowly but surely, against 
the materialism, the prositivism the naturalism, the 
atheism, which were so popular but fifteen years ago. 
Young France is tolerant. ” 

Crime; Conveying a false impression and dig¬ 
ging a foundation for the golden calf. For when 
David slew Goliath he too became tolerant. But 


99 


Newspapers , Periodicals , Etc. 

France’s tolerance, if there is any, must be due lo 
degeration caused by scribes and priest-craft. 

Dallas News , September 16, 1891 : “Don’t drink intox¬ 
icating liquor, it will not make you better . . . and 
finally proves your everlasting ruin. Don’t use tobacco in 
any form, it undermines your health . . . and no possible 
good can come from using it. ” 

Crime: Mischievous advice. 

Mischief: Nastier habits like snuff-dipping, gum- 
chewing, pill-taking, drugging. 

Diseases: Neurasthenia, anaemia, malaria. 

Ladies' Home Journal , September, 1891: “The girl to 
be avoided,” (the fast girl). 

Crime: Dangerous high perching and malicious 
joy-killing. 

Mischief: Deadening of the brighter female’s fac¬ 
ulties, celibacy, weak and unnatural women. 

Diseases: Nostalgia, insanity, anaemia, palpita¬ 
tion of the heart. 

George P. Garrison in the Texas School Journal , quoted 
in Public Opinion September 19, 1891: “Perhaps the 
worst effect of utilitarian education is that it destroys the 
disposition to form and strive after ideals . . . Boys are 
taught to narrow the channels of their mental activity 
. . . before they have . . . become capable of choosing 
for themselves. This will inevitably result in making 
them narrow-minded, prejudiced men, unfit to be either 
neighbors or citizens, and blind to the best opportunities 
which life contains.” 

Crime: Ignorance and mischievous sophistry. 
Narrow-mindedness, prejudice and fool ideals are 
exactly what non-utilitarian education turns out, if 
it does not deaden aspiration. 


too Newspapers, Periodicals, Etc . 

Mischief: Waste of precious time, waste of life, 
disgust with education, disgust with life. 

North American Review, August, 1891, printing the 
article, “Vampire Literature, by Anthony Comstock.” 

Crime: Since neglecting to answer it: j. Stink¬ 
ing. 2. Attacking liberty. 3. Laying the first 
propriety foundation for secret vice. 4. Defraud¬ 
ing both men and women from their natural happy 
tendencies. 5. Cultivating misdirections of the 
sexual instinct and manufacturing Jack the Rippers 
wholesale or en miniature. 

Mischief: Deadening all natural impulses, caus¬ 
ing more degeneracy of the human anatomy by the 
refinement and decency route; loss of sense; loss of 
happiness; medaeval slavery; persecutions, white 
capism, white cro'ssism. 

Diseases: Nostalgia, neurasthenia, all the nerv¬ 
ous horrors of secret vice, insanity, impotence, syph¬ 
ilis, kidney disorders, Bright’s disease. 

Weekly Rocky Mountain News , September 23-, 1891: 
“ Morals vs. dogma. Should this particular congress (for 
formulating a standard of morality) be held its scope of 
work, could not be more profitably directed than enforcing 
upon Christian denominations the importance of requiring 
the members to be as dilligent in good morals as they are 
zealous in their devotion to ritual or creed. 

Crime: Aiding and abetting Christian persecu¬ 
tion—morality. 

Mischief : Blue laws, crusades, destruction of 
property, murder for the sake of honor and morality, 
secret vices. 

Diseases : Neurasthenia, marrasmus. 


Newspapers, Periodicals , Etc. ioi 

The Evening Scimitar , Memphis, Term., April 3, 1891 : 
“ A wronged husband . . . Instead of being after the man 
who occupied apartments with his wife, Burt is hunting' 
Morgan, the man who had the pair arrested . . . with in¬ 
tention of doing him up.” 

Crime-. Stinking (page 32) and trying to defeat jus¬ 
tice, This husband plainly knows who wronged 
him. The adulterer never is as guilty as the stinker 
and persecutor, be he a Morgan or a newspaper. 

Mischief : Lawlessness, savagery, white cap high¬ 
way outrages, divorces. 

Diseases : Death. 

Austin Statesman of September, 1891, quoted: “Brutal 
prize fights in Dallas take place in the old Episcopal 
church on Commerce street. The walls that once echoed 
to the sweetest music, to the chanting of choirs and deep- 
toned organ notes, now giving back oaths and vile 
speeches of a motley mob, is a sight to move the wonders 
of gods and men.” 

Crime: Stinking, (page 32). An old church 
used for a brutal prize-fight serves a nobler purpose 
than when used for heathenish golden calf worship 
or bellowing forth prayers to a demon deity. 

Social Economist , July, 1891, page 311 : “ Nothing that 

Mills and Malthus prophesied has come to pass—-though 
population has increased wondrously, means of subsistence 
multiplied still faster, wages have risen and carried profits 
up with them . . . Obviously ‘ something is rotten in the 
state ’ of Mill-dom.” 

Crime; 1. A slur at science and truth. 

2. Falsehood. 

The prophesies of both Mills and Malthus have 
come true more or less in any country. If a lucky 


102 Newspapers , Periodicals , Etc . 

discovery of a new country and of machinery, a war 
and the robbing of some richer nation, better trans¬ 
portation, etc., temporary patched-over misery and 
poverty their conclusions, are not necessarily false. 
Poverty is increasing and not necessarily so because 
riches are transferred to the few. 

Mischief; The aggravating of that superhuman 
struggle for existence. 

New York Independent (Evangelical) quoted in Ptiblic 
Opinion, October io, 1891: “The great Christian Paradox; 
what is a seed of wheat? Absolutely nothing, useless, 
mere inert matter, till it is destroyed. The process of its 
destruction makes it precious. It is ground up and be¬ 
comes food, the staff of life. It decays in the ground and 
by the process produces a hundred fold. Except it die it 
bringeth forth no fruit. What is a candle? Np other or 
better than a bit of clay until it begins to be consumed, 
and then it fulfills the noble purpose of its existence, in 
giving light to all that are in the house; but in that pro¬ 
cess of being itself luminous and admirable it is utterly 
destroyed. It is a spiritual law, and on it Christianity is 
based.” (In substance, consume yourself and you will be 
the gainer, starve yourself and you will wax fat, die and 
you will stay alive.) 

C?inie : 1. Criminal fallacy. 

2. Mischievous lying. For the great Christian 
paradox is not a spiritual law nor any other law. 

3. Fraud.in favor of the contribution box. 

Mischief : Christian low passions perpetuated and 

fed. Misery increased. 

Illustrated American , October 24, 1891 : “Sunday and 
the fair v . . Would it not be preferable to open the fair in 
part ? It would be incongruous with our American ideas 
to have the exposition in full operation as on a week 
day.” 


Newspapers , Periodicals , AVc. ioj 

Crime: Aiding and abetting the connivances of 
priest and parsoncraft. 

Mischief; Filling of the contribution plate with 
coins that are needed for better purposes than devil- 
worship or celestial un-real estate. 

Almost any rural newspaper: “Minnie X., an inmate 
of a South street dive, ended her worthless existence last 
night by the morphine route. Her foul carcass was taken 
care of by Z., the undertaker.” 

Crime: Brutal barbarity and giving the last kick 
to the friendless, homeless suicide. 

Mischief: More friendlessness, more suicide. 

Almost any rural paper and Kansas City S. Sun of Novem¬ 
ber 15, 1891: A notorious family . . . Sedalions should 
take the law in their hands and drive them away as the 
grand jury will do nothing. . . . The probability is . . . 
that the people ere long will take matters into their own 
hands and bounce these people out of the neighborhood 
with a good coat of tar and feathers. 

Crime : Inciting to law-breaking and outrage. 

Mischief : White cap outrages, hangings, mur¬ 
der, secret vice. Hangings of innocents, burning 
alive, skinning alive, beating or shooting to death. 

Disease : Nostalgia (broken heart), neurasthenia, 
insanity. 

Arena , November, 1891, page 766: “To feed the rum- 
inflamed lusts of men, the manager of these craters of be¬ 
stiality and depravity have nightly exhibitions which 
mark the nadir to which abandoned womanhood can sink. 

... If the church has any mission worthy of serious 
thought at this juncture of civilization, that mission is to 
overcome this evil, etc. 


IO/f. 


Books. 


Crime'. Malicious joy-killing, aiding and abet¬ 
ting fanaticism. The church’s mission is “self” and 
with moral hunki-tunks to destroy pleasure in any 
form so that the child of man must seek nepenthe in 
the hot beds of social pollution. The church is the 
foundation of social depravity and cancer spots of 
life. 

BOOKS. 

Error's Chains: How Forged and Broken , by Frank L. 
Dobbins and one LL. B., Ph. D. for assistants. A com¬ 
plete, graphic and comparative history of the many strange 
beliefs, superstitions, practices, sacred writings, etc. Page 
767: “At first, we have seen the world worshipped one 
God ; then many gods and idols were introduced. Re¬ 
peated efforts to restore the pure worship of primitive 
times ended in failure. Zoroaster tried and failed ; Buddha 
tried, and he failed ; Mohamed tried, and he failed ; Jesus, 
the Christ, tried and he did not fail.” Page 769: “Com¬ 
pare the best parts of the best of the heathen religions 
with any part of Christianity. One cannot but see the 
marked contrasts, and the infinite superiority of Christian¬ 
ity. This being so, then does it not follow that they who 
are seeking to give the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the world 
are rendering a service to humanity ?” 

Crime: Mischievous sophistry and falsehood. 
Christ has not succeeded in restoring the worship of 
one God. It is not proven that primitive worship 
was for a single deity exclusively. The superiority 
of Christianity does not prove that the heathen would 
be benefitted by it. 

Rational Psychology , by Laurens P. Hickok, D. D., page 
451: “Action and reaction, attraction and repulsion, cen¬ 
tripetal and centrifugal agencies fill the whole, sphere of 


Books , 


105 

universal nature, but no working of physical forces can 
press back of the central point in which they have their 
genesis, and invate the world of the supernatural.” 

Page 541: “All this is conditional and held in nec¬ 
essity by somewhat that has gone before ,. and can be 
but nature still, making no possible approximation to¬ 
wards the supernatural . . . The fact therefore that man 
comprehends nature in the compass of an absolute per¬ 
sonality is demonstrating that he is soul. 

Crime: Mischievous sophistry and false termin¬ 
ology. The unknown up to date is not the super¬ 
natural. Man does not comprehend nature entirely 
and if he did it would not necessarily prove that he 
was made up partly of the supernatural (soul.) 

Montieth Physical Geography, school book, page 42 : 
“Rven the necessity of coal in the working of iron ore, 
wos provided for by Him.” 

Crime: 1. Teaching non science and false prin¬ 
ciples. 2. Robbing the young of their most preci¬ 
ous chances of mind development. 

Progress and Poverty, by Henry George, its 

Crime: False and dangerous terminology. The 
title of the book should have been “Scribe and 
Pharisee Retrogression and Poverty. The argu¬ 
ments should have been plain, thus : Two men 
have more standing room in a tub than one. The 
more birds there are the more worms, and bigger 
ones. The Desert of Sahara is held for speculation. 
Duping is progress and gain. 

Mischief: Delay of true remedies and much use¬ 

less wear and tear of body and mind. 


Etc., etc., etc. 


106 Books . 

It will be seen that untruths, such as “ improved 
food manufacture/’ ‘ the nation’s grief and gloom 
over a departed queen,” war alarms, reports to de¬ 
press or raise the price of stocks, canards, political 
distortion and exaggeration of facts, booms and 
swindling transactions, the marketing of personal 
spite and malice for revenue and revenge, likewise 
ante-mortem obituaries of noted scientists and free¬ 
thinkers, pickings at the bones of Voltaire, Paine, 
Bruno and Darwin by the daily press are not de¬ 
tailed, and the dangerous champagne—and feather¬ 
bed optimism of authors not aired because all these 
sink into insignificance at the havoc and disaster 
wrought by their fierce war on natural laws , true 
utility and benefit. 


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

0 027 133 179 4 


